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2019
A splash of something huge resounds through the sea-fog. In the stillness of a dark room, some unspeakable evil is making its approach. This new selection offers the most chilling and unsettling of Hodgson's short fiction, from encounters with abominations at sea to fireside tales of otherworldly forces from his inventive `occult detective' character Carnacki, the ghost finder. A master of conjuring atmosphere, when the horror inevitably arrives it is delivered with breathtaking pace and the author's unique evocation of overwhelming panic.
Wordsworth Editions Blog
The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson2021 •
Benson’s name is most closely linked to his enduringly popular ‘Mapp and Lucia’ series, published between 1920 and 1937, comic novels gently but unerringly satirising the mores of the upper-middle-class provincial English. The series represents an ongoing struggle for social prestige in the fictional seaside town of ‘Tilling’ (based on Rye in East Sussex, where Benson lived and, like Lucia, served as mayor) between appalling snobs Mrs. Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas and Miss Elizabeth Mapp. There have been several TV and radio adaptations, the most recent by the BBC in 2014. Benson’s combination of humour and social commentary is reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse and Ivy Compton-Burnett and the so-called ‘camp novel’. His first novel, the fashionably provocative Dodo (1893), had been an immediate bestseller and his early literary success allowed Benson to live in comfort and do nothing but write, travel and play. He thus found time to write 64 other novels, three autobiographies, and 30 works of nonfiction, including biographies of Charlotte Brontë, Queen Victoria, and Edward VII, and A Book of Golf. What is perhaps less well known nowadays is that Benson wrote literally dozens of what he called ‘spook stories’. These were originally published in magazines like Pearson’s, Hutchinson’s and the Pall Mall and then reprinted in the collections The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928), and More Spook Stories (1934) – all collected chronologically in the Wordsworth Editions’ Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson edited by David Stuart Davies. His story ‘The Bus Conductor’ (1906), in which the hero is haunted by a hearse driver in premonition of a fatal crash, was adapted in Basil Dearden’s segment for the 1944 Ealing anthology horror film Dead of Night. The story’s chilling mantra ‘Room for one more’ became a national catchphrase and when Bennett Cerf included it in his Famous Ghost Stories it spawned an urban legend that persists to this day. In his own era, Benson was as famous as a horror writer as he was a humourist. H.P. Lovecraft considered him a writer ‘of singular power’ and praised his stories as ‘lethally potent’ in their ‘relentless aura of doom’, rating Benson alongside Wells and Conan Doyle, H.D. Everett, May Sinclair, and William Hope Hodgson – not quite up there with the ‘Modern Master’ M.R. James, but a pretty fair second place. In structure, there are similarities with James’ stories, but what distinguishes them from those of the antiquarian academic is the setting. Unlike James’, Benson’s supernatural world is utterly contemporary: that of the inter-war gentleman of means and confirmed bachelor (like James, Benson was discreetly gay); with manservants, motorcars, summer leases, property envy, bridge, golf, brisk walks, and plenty of huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’. In short, it is the same world as that of ‘Mapp and Lucia’. Benson’s jaunty narrators, who are often writers clearly based on himself, combine, as did he, the easy confidence and breezy enthusiasm of his class, an open mind, and a fierce intelligence. They are invariably rich single men drifting from one let, holiday home, or long visit to the next, who, mostly in company with another male friend, meet an elemental monster in the woods or find themselves in a haunted house. Imagine a Bertie Wooster figure, only with the intellect of Jeeves. And then shove him towards something terrible.
MLitt Dissertation, University of Stirling
Weird Spirits and Eerie Entities: the queer ghosts of M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman2020 •
This dissertation seeks to address the notion of queerness within the Gothic- specifically, within the works of M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman- by redefining and expanding the definition of the term to move beyond sexuality. It is not the authors themselves that are queer, it argues, but the representations of the ghostly figures and the identities of their protagonists that are queer through non-normativity and comparison with contemporary examples. Using work by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on ‘queerness’ in combination with Mark Fisher’s theory of the weird and the eerie, it will show how queer identities are both constitutive and fracturing within the texts, as well as exploring how this is connected with both the presences and absences found within them. It will first explore the context and history of ghosts and ghostly literature throughout the nineteenth century, as well as offering a survey of the linguistic and theoretical history of the term ‘queer’ and queer theory in general, before using this outline to analyse James, Machen and Aickman in turn. The argument will focus on moving beyond extant criticism on the authors, particularly psychoanalytical analyses, to show how authorial intent and personal biography is not always an essential component of literary criticism. A key component of the argument will be to show how fractured identities- of ghosts that manifest in unfamiliar ways, humans that move between states of being and tensions between past and present, society and nature- work to displace and threaten constitutive identities, introducing weirdness of eeriness into normative spaces. It will conclude with a comparison of the three authors to outline their similarities as well as fundamental differences but showing how, in their contemporaneously different representations of ghosts and ghostly beings and the fractured identities of their protagonists, their ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’ ghost stories are queer in their own way.
New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature
New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature2018 •
New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft
Reception Claims in Supernatural Horror in Literature and the Course of Weird Fiction2018 •
This chapter explores H. P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," considering the ways in which Lovecraft attempted to construct favorable conditions for the reception of his own work. The writing of the essay was a pivotal moment in Lovecraft's career and authorial self-fashioning. Both it and he went on to influence the development of weird fiction in Lovecraft's lifetime and subsequently, lasting well into the current period of reevaluation of the author's legacy and person.
Gothic Studies
Roger Luckhurst, H. P. Lovecraft: The Classic Horror Stories. Edited with an Introduction and Notes2018 •
2016 •
Weird fiction is a mode in the Gothic lineage, cognate with horror, particularly associated with the early twentieth-century pulp writing of H. P. Lovecraft and others for Weird Tales magazine. However, the roots of the weird lie earlier and late-Victorian British and Edwardian writers such as Arthur Machen, Count Stenbock, M. P. Shiel, and John Buchan created varyingly influential iterations of the mode. This thesis is predicated on an argument that Lovecraft’s recent rehabilitation into the western canon, together with his ongoing and arguably ever-increasing impact on popular culture, demands an examination of the earlier weird fiction that fed into and resulted in Lovecraft’s work. Although there is a focus on the literary fields of the fin de siecle and early twentieth century, by tracking the mutable reputations and critical regard of these early exponents of weird fiction, this thesis engages with broader contextual questions of cultural value and distinction; of notions of e...
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2012 •
2019 •
Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine
Influence of size, surface coating and fine chemical composition on the in vitro reactivity and in vivo biodistribution of lipid nanocapsules versus lipid nanoemulsions in cancer models2013 •
2006 •
2022 American Control Conference (ACC)
Interval Observer Synthesis for Locally Lipschitz Nonlinear Dynamical Systems via Mixed-Monotone Decompositions