Kaja Franck

Ginger Snaps (2000) has been recognised as an exemplary example of feminist horror, yet the sequels have received little attention. This article analyses the final film in the trilogy, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004), by looking at the use of folklore within the story. On first appearance, Ginger Snaps Back reacts to the ending of the first film, in which Brigitte kills her lupine sister Ginger, consolidating feminist readings whilst drawing on earlier Gothic traditions. Set in the nineteenth century, the film draws on Canadian Gothic tropes with the two sisters trapped in an isolated fort, surrounded by frozen forest and beset by werewolves. The narrative explains the origins of the lycanthropy, which affects the sisters in their future incarnations, by appropriating indigenous beliefs and folklore. In doing so, it echoes another Canadian werewolf narrative, Henry Beaugrand’s ‘The Werwolves' (1898). Similarly, Beaugrand’s story opens with a group of hunters, woodsmen and militia spending the Christmas period in Fort Richelieu, Quebec. Surrounded by forests, the fort acts a point of civilisation for these frontiersmen. This location evokes North American fears, and the representation of the wooded wilderness within American Gothic literature as full of wild beasts and wild men that surrounded European-American settlements. Beaugrand collapse the ‘wild beasts’ and ‘wild men’ into one hybrid monster: his werewolves are indigenous people. However, he fails to properly depict wolf-into-man transformations within native belief systems. Rather, he absorbs them into French-Canadian lycanthropic folklore as an anti-Christian entity, disavowing the subjectivity of his non-white werewolves.
By comparing the depiction of werewolves in Ginger Snaps Back and Beaugrand’s story, this article uncovers the implications of ignoring native folklore, as well as the dangers of misappropriating them. On first appearance the filmic representation of werewolves and indigenous people appears to undermine Beaugrand’s colonist viewpoint. However, the overlap of folklore and fauxlore naturalises the ownership of the land by European colonisers.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories was published posthumously in April 1914, two years after the author’s death. Its name linked it with the more widely known novel Dracula (1897), leading scholars to argue whether “Dracula’s Guest” was ever intended to sit within its parent text or was simply a stand-alone short story. Analysis of “Dracula’s Guest” has been limited by these arguments, and little has been written about the manner in which the short story affects interpretations of Dracula. Our aim in this article is to suggest that, whether or not the story was intended to form part of the wider novel, it still tells us much about perceptions of the vampire/werewolf relationship and how this is misunderstood with regard to the novel Dracula. The (were)wolf in “Dracula’s Guest” returns in Dracula but has been overlooked; instead Dracula has become the classic blueprint for the vampire. Since its publication, “Dracula’s Guest” has appeared in anthologies for both vampire and werewolf stories as it includes both elements, suggesting a confusion between the two creatures. The story shows Stoker’s interest in lycanthropy as well as vampires, and the influence this had on Count Dracula’s creation.

John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven has been identified as the beginning of the gentlemanly vampire. Unlike his progeny, Count Dracula, Ruthven is able to pass in polite society, making his seductive nature more insidious and damaging. Thus he predicts the arrival of late twentieth-century vampires such as Anne Rice’s much lauded ‘sympathetic vampires’, and the sparkling vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. By considering the intersection between gender, the Gothic and consumerism, an innovative reading of Meyer’s addition to the clan of literary bloodsuckers can be offered.
Where Polidori’s narrative is focalised through Aubrey’s increasingly disgusted and disturbed viewpoint, Meyer’s novels usurp the masculine voice, replacing it with the object of the vampire’s desire, Bella Cullen. Aubrey’s sister, like Ianthe, is presented as the passive victim of vampirism; her desire for Ruthven is never confirmed nor explored. In comparison, Bella’s desire for Edward is explicit: Ruthven’s ‘deadly hue’ is replaced by sparkling attraction. Romantic tropes such as the blazon are used against Edward and female desire is a central theme within the text. The relationship between vampire and victim is inverted, as Edward becomes the passive object of Bella’s vampiric gaze. Moreover, he is complicit in this objectification, apparently receiving masochistic pleasure from being the centre of the gaze and denying his own desire.
Two hundred years after its publication, Polidori’s narrative, and its critique of consumerism and social mores, is re-imagined for a twenty-first audience who are attracted rather than repulsed by the Other/ ‘other’. Like Ruthven, the Cullens are at once embedded within and yet permanently removed from their society. However, rather than being symbols of social degradation, they are held up as an aspirational, wholesome family. Thus Meyer’s vampires act as reflections of consumerist desire for a society shaped by social media and celebrity culture.

The Gothic as a mode has a clear visual language—particularly in regard to Gothic landscapes. Nature in Gothic literature vacillates between awe-inspiring sublimity and oppressive hell-scapes. Central to these depictions is the idea of wild spaces untouched by humanity, and the concept of ‘wilderness,’ a recurring trope within the subgenre of ecogothic. Concomitant to the fear and reverence that wilderness invokes are the wild animals that lived therein. This chapter uncovers the importance of wilderness, including monstrous animals, to ecogothic texts considering how its portrayal as an overwhelming threat to both the ideals of humanity and its very existence.

As a hybrid monster, werewolves have stimulated questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals. Their duality has also been used as a metaphor for the presentation of adolescence from 'Little Red Riding Hood' to Teen Wolf. Both Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver trilogy and Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate are YA texts which centre on the love story between a human and a werewolf. They use the figure of the werewolf to contrast the boundary between
child/ adult with that between animal/ human. Their representations centre on the relationship between self-control versus hormonally fuelled sexuality and aggression, and the idea of evolving from being a child to an adult. Blood and Chocolate shows embracing being a werewolf as part of growing up whereas Shiver presents being a werewolf as a traumatic loss of self from which to escape.
Yet both novels end with the acceptance that werewolves and humans cannot inhabit the same space. Klause's lycanthropic protagonist, Vivian is unable to inform Aidan, her human partner, that she means him no harm. Aidan's liberal attitudes are shown to be superficial leaving Vivian to return to her pack and accept her role as alpha female. In Shiver, Sam and Grace are separated by the wolf's lack of voice. Their only hope is to find a cure for the disease of lycanthropy so that they can remain human. The werewolf's lack of language when transformed is pivotal in presenting adolescence and the state of being a werewolf as untenable in the long term. By comparing the representation of lycanthropy and adolescence, this paper argues that the use of this metaphor denies the possibility of communication between human and wolf, and reaffirms the boundary between humans and animals.

Whilst Dracula is considered to be the seminal novel about vampires, it remains haunted by the figure of the wolf who exists on the outskirts of the text, appearing at moments of heightened emotions. The wolves are introduced through the sound of their howls and continue be denied a realised physicality appearing as wraiths rather than animals. Their presence is laden with metaphor. Count Dracula is peculiarly wolfish: the dual nature of Count Dracula viewed through critical theory regarding human/animal dichotomies encapsulates ideas about Victorian notions of civilisation versus the untamed ‘other’.  This figure of the ‘Other’ within Dracula encompasses contemporary fears pertaining to evolution and degeneration; an increasing instability within masculinity identity; the rise of the New Woman; the ongoing dominion over nature seen during the Industrial Revolution; and the sense of flux at the approaching fin-de-siècle.
Towards the middle of the novel, there is a pivotal moment in which the ‘tame’ wolf in London Zoo escapes; an act which, according to its keeper, is caused by the perverse influence of Dracula who visits the wolves’ enclosure. After this event Lucy becomes a vampire and Mina is attacked by Dracula. The parallel between the potentially wild but caged creature being freed by the vampire’s presence and the fall of Victorian women into wantonness exemplifies another function of vampire/wolf relations within the novel. Femininity is in the same realm as nature and can only be controlled by society’s civilising constraints. These fears create a need to re-assert social boundaries: boundaries which are challenged by the fluid presence of Count Dracula as he slips between human and animal form. There are strong parallels between the description of Count Dracula’s vampiric nature and the wolves that haunt the text: shown categorically in Dracula’s ability to become a wolf.
The overlap between vampires and wolves within Dracula is particularly interesting in regards to the creation of a Gothic natural landscape and the function of the vampire figure within the novel as a centre of amorphous fears surrounding late Victorian social concerns. Emily Gerard’s travel diaries, The Land Beyond the Forest (1888), form a basis for the Victorian fascination with an Eastern Europe awash with jarring superstitions at odds with the scientific and technological revolution taking place in Britain. Her work was an inspiration to Stoker’s creation of Dracula and its’ Gothic landscape. The Transylvanian wolves at the beginning novel are seen through Jonathan Harker’s eyes as alien creatures who reflect the Gothic landscape of Hungary – the term ‘uncanny’ is repeatedly used in his journal. Freud argued that the true quality of the ‘uncanny’ is the return of what was once familiar but has become unfamiliar; it is not without irony that wolves were originally native to Britain but were strategically wiped out as part of the ‘civilising’ of the land. Stoker relocates the figure of the howling wolf so that it becomes part of a universal Gothic imagination: a symbol of a vengeful natural world tearing at the borders of Western civilisation.

From King Kong to The Last of Us, the terror of the natural world – or rather, what humans have done to it – pervades the horror genre. Join us for this panel discussion with a series of experts to explore eco-horror from a variety of perspectives, including eco-horror and indigeneity, animal horror, killer plants, and environmental horror across a variety of national contexts and horror subgenres. Just remember… don’t feed the plants!

Chaired by Lindsay Hallam, (University of East London)
Panellists: Kaja Franck (University of Hertfordshire), Russ Hunter (Northumbria University), Dawn Keetley (Lehigh University), Catherine Lester (University of Birmingham), Kali Simmons (Portland State University)

Following on from a talk given by Paul Adams on vampire serial killers, this talk is about the emergence of the sympathetic vampire. The killers presented in Adams’ talk are people whose actions render them barely human. In contrast vampires in fiction are becoming, if not more human, than more sympathetic which offers a different way of engaging with monsters, difference and what makes someone 'other'.

In their article ‘Biting Bella: Treaty Negotiation, Quileute History, and Why “Team Jacob” Is Doomed to Lose’, Judith Leggatt and Kristin Burnett, lay out a well-researched case for the parallels between Edward and Jacob’s war over Bella and the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers. The relationship between Jacob’s attributes as a supernatural creature and a Native American are further explored by Natalie Wilson in her essay ‘It’s a Wolf Thing: The Quileute Werewolf/ Shape-Shifter Hybrid as Noble Savage’. Whilst both essays form a solid basis for the exploration of Jacob as a Native American character they over look aspects of Jacob’s presentation of himself in respect to Bella’s consuming gaze and the explicitly heternormative nature of the text especially regarding the relationship between Jacob and Edward which climaxes in his ‘imprinting’ on Renesmee. The disavowal of alternate sexualities in the Twilight series enables readings which undermine the ‘fairytale Gothic’ of Meyer’s world where the good are rewarded with happy endings.

This paper offers a queer reading of the character of Jacob to analyse how aspects of alterity are elided in Meyer's work so that the character of Jacob is always, already on the losing team.

As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole's 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of 'the fairy kind of writing' which, for Addison, 'raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader' and 'and favour those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject'. Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), talks of 'the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies'. 'Horror' and 'terror' are key terms of affect in Gothic criticism; Townsend urges us, however, to move away from this dichotomy. While we are certainly interested in the darker aspects of fairies and the fear they may induce, this conference also welcomes attention to that aspect of Gothic that invokes wonder and enchantment.

This is a review of a history of the vampire in British culture - from 'fact' to fiction. It looks at occult beliefs, including the Highgate Vampire; ghost stories; literature; films, with an extensive section on the Hammer Horror versions of Dracula; and folklore.

An article for 'Folklore Thursday': Werewolves are considered to be a traditional monster in the twenty-first-century popular culture. This is in part due to the creation of a lycanthropic tradition based on appropriated folklore. Whilst pulp fiction is often related to the burgeoning genre of science fiction, the use of Victorian folklore and pseudo-folklore regarding the lycanthrope has a clear influence on pulp fiction werewolves. Brian Frost argues that the pulp magazines of the early twentieth-century invigorated the werewolf literature by making the tales more plot-driven and absorbing them into fantasy literature (The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature [2003], pp. 106-108). While Chantal Bourgault Du Coudray draws attention to the increased overlap between the detective narrative and werewolf stories in order to locate the abhorrent element of society (The Curse of the Werewolf [2006], pp. 42-43). Certainly the trope of the detective helps to define the werewolf for a new generation of readers, but it is the use of folklore, and sometimes ‘fauxlore’, based on academic research which authenticates the portrayal of this monster, giving it a distinguished lineage.

An interview by Kathryn Chapman with myself and Jon Kaneko-James regarding British Gothic. This was for MediaMagazine in conjunction with the BFI as part of the BFI Gothic season.

"What makes the Gothic so powerful for British audiences? Why are we Brits so fascinated by a particular Victorian concept of the genre – and what superstitions and fears fuel its popularity? Kathryn Chapman researches the issue."

In his work Trolls: An Unnatural History (2014), John Lindow argues that trolls originated as beings of nature, connected to a time when mankind lived in closer communion with the natural world. Alternatively, Joan Roll-Hansen states that trolls represent nature as dangerous and uncontrolled. Trolls have moved from ancient sagas and fairy tales to appearing in such varied modern texts as Kerstin Ekman’s The Forest of Hours (trans. 1998), Holly Black’s Valiant (2005), and Trollhunter (2011), as well as the ubiquitous internet term ‘troll’. Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown (trans. 2003) navigates the complex representation of the troll and its relationship to the Scandinavian wilderness.

The novel follows Mikael, a young photographer who leads a hedonistic lifestyle, and his discovery of a baby troll, Pessi. His desire to care for this seemingly vulnerable animal forces him recognise the futility of his isolated existence and the cruelty that occurs within the human world. Sinisalo’s use of intertextuality – Pessi’s name is taken from Yrjö Kokko’s ‘Pessi and Ilusia’ (1944) and means pessimism – acknowledges the previous representation of the troll as a creature of the darkness. However, this paper argues that Pessi symbolises the resistance of the natural world to industrialisation, and can be read as a creature of the ecoGothic. Unlike his namesake, Pessi offers a future for the natural world, albeit one that may require mankind to change by force, seen in an adult troll’s ownership of a gun. Thus the novel combines the idealised desire to return to a time when the relationship between man and nature was more symbiotic, and the fear that nature may revolt against humanity. Moreover, Sinisalo’s creation of an alternate (un)natural history for the troll, Felipthecus trollius, critiques both the limits of human knowledge regarding the natural world and our assumed ownership of the land.

Ginger Snaps (2000) has been recognised as an exemplary example of feminist horror, yet the sequels have received little attention. The final film in the trilogy, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004), answers the concerns regarding the ending of the first film – Brigitte kills her sister Ginger, the werewolf of the title − whilst drawing on earlier Gothic traditions. Set in the nineteenth century, the two sisters are trapped in an isolated fort surrounded by frozen forest and attacked by werewolves. This setting echoes another Canadian werewolf narrative, Henry Beaugrand’s ‘The Werwolves' (1898). Beaugrand’s story opens with a group of hunters, woodsmen and militia spending the Christmas period in Fort Richelieu, Quebec. Surrounded by forests, the fort acts a point of civilisation for these frontiersmen. This location evokes North American fears, and the representation of the wooded wilderness within American Gothic literature as full of wild beasts and wild men that surrounded European-American settlements. Beaugrand collapse the ‘wild beasts’ and ‘wild men’ into one hybrid monster: his werewolves are indigenous people. ‘The Werwolves’ reflects racist and colonial attitudes towards the indigenous population. Moreover, the central werewolf of Beaugrand’s narrative is also female.
Using an ecoGothic approach, this paper argues that Ginger Snaps Back challenges the racist and sexist elements of Beaugrand’s earlier text and, in doing so, reacts to the idea that the wilderness is a threatening space. Though the gender of the werewolf remains the same in the film, the werewolf is white. This, and the depiction of the white inhabitants of the fort, uncovers the truth that, rather than being a symbol of civilisation battling against barbarism, the fort symbolises the fear and hatred towards the people and natural world that European settlers believed they found in North America.

Thalassophobia, the fear of what lurks beneath the sea, has following the release of Jaws (1975) become synonymous with the great white shark. Using the tagline ‘You’ll never go in the water again’, Spielberg’s film presented the sea as a Gothic space threatening the human subject. The release of the film led to a decrease in shark numbers across the world. Whether Gothic texts have an effect on their consumers has been an issue of contention throughout the history of the Gothic - Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) famously parodied the presumed effect of horrid novels on a female readership. This paper analyses the relationship between the Gothic symbolism of sharks, sea and humans using Sharknado (2013).

Drawing on Jaws and B-movie creature-features, Sharknado seemingly parodies humanity’s excessive fear of sharks. The film breaks with the original’s use of the ‘othered’ space of the sea by allowing its toothed protagonists access to dry land. Both sharks and natural phenomena are shown to be uncontrollable as the natural world reeks revenge on LA, a city landscape synonymous with the worst excesses of human society. In considering the success of Sharknado, this paper asks to what extent the film explodes our fear of the shark or whether it simply re-inscribes the Gothic representation of the sea for a new generation.

The werewolf has been portrayed as the ultimate hybrid monster. An example of nature made Gothic, the werewolf ruptures the divide between human and animal threatening mankind’s control of the natural world. In Whitely Strieber’s The Wolfen (1978), however, the werewolf is not a hybrid creature, transforming between two states, but a separate species, Canis Lupus Sapien, or the Wolfen. The Wolfen are presumed monstrous because they prey on humans but their characterisation within the novel forces the reader to question the separation of humans and animals. Wolfen are shown to have a complex non-verbal language and empathy for other Wolfen. By giving a material presence to the Wolfen in his novel, Strieber shows how the presentation of the werewolf can exacerbate the hatred between man and wolf. Strieber uses scientific language and authority in his narrative to illustrate how mankind makes both wolves, and by extension werewolves, Gothic monsters. In this narrative, mankind’s increasing disbelief in the existence of werewolves runs parallel to the destruction of wolf populations and the movement into cities. This paper will show how the Wolfen can be read as symbolising the fear between man and (were)wolf in the form of a hyper-real, preternaturally intelligent, lupine monster.

Algernon Blackwood describes the werewolf in ‘The Camp of the Dog’ (1908), part of his John Silence series, as ‘the savage […] instincts of a passionate man scouring the world in his fluidic body’ echoing Elphias Levy’s description in Transcendental Magic (1856). Other weird writers appropriated versions of European folklore to historicise their werewolves. Seabury Quinn’s ‘The Man Who Cast No Shadow’ (1927) features a stand-off between occult detective, de Grandin, and Count Czerny, a Hungarian Count who has hairy palms, drinks blood, and casts no reflection in a mirror. The tale bears all the hallmarks of Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – which also (mis)appropriated Eastern European folklore. The recurrence of the detective functions as a Van-Helsing-like figure defining the werewolf for a new generation of readers. Using these, and other examples, this paper will consider how the use of earlier folklore gave pulp werewolves a veneer of Gothic authenticity.

As a hybrid monster, werewolves have stimulated questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals. Their duality has also been used as a metaphor for the presentation of adolescence from 'Little Red Riding Hood' to Teen Wolf. Both Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver trilogy and Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate are YA texts which centre on the love story between a human and a werewolf. They use the figure of the werewolf to contrast the boundary between child/ adult with that between animal/ human. Their representations centre on the relationship between self-control versus hormonally fuelled sexuality and aggression, and the idea of evolving from being a child to an adult. Blood and Chocolate shows embracing being a werewolf as part of growing up whereas Shiver presents being a werewolf as a traumatic loss of self from which to escape.Yet both novels end with the acceptance that werewolves and humans cannot inhabit the same space. Klause's lycanthropic protagonist,Vivian is unable to inform Aidan, her human partner, that she means him no harm. Aidan's liberal attitudes are shown to be superficial leaving Vivian to return to her pack and accept her role as alpha female. In Shiver, Sam and Grace are separated by the wolf's lack of voice. Their only hope is to find a cure for the disease of lycanthropy so that they can remain human. The werewolf's lack of language when transformed is pivotal in presenting adolescence and the state of being a werewolf as untenable in the long term.  By comparing the representation of lycanthropy and adolescence, this paper argues that the use of this metaphor denies the possibility of communication between human and wolf, and reaffirms the boundary between humans and animals.

In the first chapter of Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf, the reader is introduced to Jacob Marlowe – the last werewolf of the title – and his future killers, the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomenon. Marlowe accepts that, having been located by the group, he will die and is surprised to find that a faction of this organisation does not want him dead. The reason is simple: the existence of the hunters is connected to the continued survival of werewolves.
This realisation replicates the changing relationship between hunters and their prey at the end of the nineteenth-century, when the hunters realised that they were exterminating animals too efficiently. Extinct animals, such as the dodo, became fantastical and the story of their deaths fables. Thus the dominion of humanity over animals moved towards protecting the natural world leading to the creation of nature reserves. Here, it was hoped, the destructive behaviour of mankind could be excluded so that nature reserves contained an untouched version of the past. The wonderful, strange wilderness was being located within manmade parameters.  Surveillance techniques were used to locate animals who did not acknowledge such boundaries. In the darkly titled ‘Inventing a Beast with No Body’, Charlie Bergman explains how the tagged animal became a disembodied creature haunting an ecologically aware society through the beeping of its collar.
By introducing a supernatural creature into his narrative, Duncan heightens the loss of the fantastical wilderness. This paper argues that his work presents the relationship between the Gothic quality of nature reserves - as areas where the past remains - and Gothic spaces of the imagination which cannot be so easily contained and located. By paralleling ecological concerns with killing the last werewolf, the reader must witness both the death of a supernatural creature and the removal of the fantastic from their lives.

This paper explores how Bram Stoker uses Emily Gerard's The Land Beyond the Forest (1888) to create a Gothicised version of Transylvania which exists outside the realms of Western experience: a landscape peopled with monstrous wolves and the lycanthropic Count Dracula. Though presented as the ultimate vampire, Dracula is both werewolf and vampire. Dracula abounds with wolfishness and Stoker builds upon Victorian ideas regarding the wilderness and animality to make the Transylvanian wolf exemplify Gothic nature. A once native species, the arrival to Britain of Count Dracula in the form of the Big Bad Wolf encapsulates the uncanny quality of Stoker's representation of Transylvania, a place from which childhood nightmares return.

In the novel, whilst listening to howling wolves, Dracula tells Jonathan Harker, “Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter”. Bram Stoker shows Dracula to be part wolf. He represents Transylvanian, Gothic nature which threatens Britain embodied in the naive Englishman Harker. By the end of the novel, Harker is transformed into a steely hero and the text builds to the inevitable climax – the destruction of the wolf. This paper looks how the presentation of Dracula as a hybrid werewolf-vampire engages with a wider ideology which suggests killing the wolf is a noble endeavour. By comparing the characters of Jonathan Harker and oft-overlooked Quincey Morris, I argue that Dracula is a hunting text related to the masculine Victorian culture of hunting which saw killing animals as a way of enacting imperial power over the wilderness. Quincey Morris represents the manly New World to which European settlers brought stories of monstrous wolves fuelling the slaughter of the American wolf population. His role in the novel is to re-engage the gentlemanly Harker with the thrill of the chase in order to save England.

In November 2013, three wolves were shot dead having escaped from Colchester Zoo. Whilst debates regarding 'rewilding' the British countryside by reintroducing these animals show how little our attitude towards them has changed. Wolves remain the heretic, the outsider, and the threat represented by nature. These ideas culminate in the figure of the werewolf: a creature who has evolved from demonic fact to Gothic fiction. From 'Little, Red Riding Hood' to An American Werewolf in London, the figure of the werewolf has stimulated questions regarding the boundaries of the Gothic natural world and rational spaces of civilisation.

In Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver trilogy lycanthropic spaces are demarcated through the use of nature reserves which are notionally used to offer protection for the humans outside and the animals within but now symbolise humanity's attempts to contain monstrous nature.  This paper looks to explore how Stiefvater's work draws on the tropes of fairy tales and the supernatural to explore Gothic spaces positing a framework that de-constructs human/ animal relations. When human protagonists, whose liminality is embodied in their adolescence, challenge these boundaries by engaging with the animal within, the response by the adult world is violence towards the (were)wolves. However, by prioritizing the human aspect of the werewolf over its wolfish side Stiefvater's text fails to fully engage with ecological debates surrounding human/ animal relations. Her naturalistic approach to the werewolf and use of scientific discourse in explaining the phenomenon undercuts the potential within the text to offer a supernatural space for the wolf to speak. Once again, the wolf remains at the margins of the Gothic text.

From 'Little, Red Riding Hood' to An American Werewolf in London, werewolves have stimulated questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals. Over the years the werewolf has evolved from demonic fact to Gothic fantasy.  In its early incarnation in folklore, the werewolf embodied fear of the wolf: a symbol of nature at its wildest and most destructive.  This was wolf with the addition of man's reason and an appetite for human flesh. With the advent of cinema in the 1900s, the werewolf had been re-interpreted. Gone were the dealings with devil, replaced with the full moon and silver bullets. The werewolf became metaphor for the latent animalistic savagery of mankind controlled only by the veneer of society. The wolf itself became coincidental to the werewolf, and as it disappeared from view in nature so it became lost behind the metaphoric power of its fantastical other.

Yet the consistent feature of the werewolf has been its lack of speech. In wolf form, the werewolf, like its animal counterpart, has for the most part been unable to communicate. In folklore, this reflected the theological order of living things: wolf was animal therefore inferior to humans. By the 20th century, the speechless werewolf reflected the removal of the wolf from our lives.  The potential for dialogue between the human and animal through the fantastical werewolf has, ironically, been undermined by contemporary attempts at realistic representations of these mythical creatures which prioritise the human voice. Language has been regarded as for humanity alone, helping us shape ideas of morality, art, and defining the difference between humans and animals. This paper will give a brief introduction to the trope of the speechless werewolf and what this means to human/ animal relations. It will argue that through the medium of fantasy Anne Rice's recent offering to lycanthropic literature, The Wolf Gift trilogy, has evolved the figure of the werewolf to have a voice and act as an intermediary between nature and culture. Rice's werewolves are re-named morphenkinder removing previous negative connotations and making lycanthropy not a curse but a gift. Though not wholly successful, Rice's work points to the power of fantasy to bridge the divide between human and animal by creating imaginary spaces where the two sides can meet.

Much of the criticism that the 'Twilight Saga' has elicited stems from the belief that it signals the destruction of the Gothic as a literary art form. Critics have been quick to argue that it is badly written whilst many have suggested that the novels have a malignant effect on young readers. By looking at various sources this paper demonstrates the similarities between reactions to first-wave Gothic, specifically the novels of Ann Radcliffe, and the 'Twilight' novels. A connection is made between the fears surrounding the relationship between Gothic literature and an increasingly commercialised society, and how these apprehensions find voice in the treatment of female authors of the Gothic and their readers.

This paper draws on the work of the critic E. J. Clery but appropriates it as a way of exploring the concerns surrounding the works of Stephenie Meyer. The attacks made by critics against Gothic literature present the genre as symptomatic of declining morals cause by commodifiction.. Thus the reaction of critics highlights the manner in which readers of the Gothic have been continually denigrated. This paper suggest a new way of reading the 'Twilight' series which concludes that rather than signalling the death of Gothic literature it is in fact an enervating additions that returns to the source of Gothic literature.

My thesis reclaims the wolf from the werewolf and considers how lycanthropy can be used to explore the complex relationship between humans and wolves, using ecogothic analysis. My texts started in the Victorian period but concentrated on 20th and 21st-century narratives, including Young Adult literature, films, and other examples of popular culture. I concentrated on how wolves have been used to symbolise the wilderness and humanity’s fear of nature as a threatening Gothic Other. Rejecting more traditional explorations of the werewolf as ‘the beast within’, my thesis reclaimed the figure of the wolf from anthropocentric readings. In particular considering on how language has been used to demarcate animal alterity and deny subjectivity to non-humans.