CNCSI Online Event -Nature and Horror in the Nineteenth Century

The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CN-CSI) is pleased to announce a one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the relationship between nature and horror in nineteenth-century culture across the globe.

If it was at the end of the century that horror as a genre truly came into its own, its first stirrings began much earlier. Throughout the nineteenth century — from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844), to Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Giant Wistaria’ (1891) — depictions of haunted land- and seascapes possessed by monstrous and hybrid forms demonstrated an international cultural fixation with the natural world and the uncanny other-than-human agencies which populated it. Alongside the emergence of the first formulations of ‘ecology’, scientists, writers, and artists began to grapple anew with humankind’s profound interrelatedness with its environment. At the same time, vast environmental changes wrought by industrialisation, colonial expansion, and epidemic disease were destabilising nineteenth-century environments on a global scale. By the fin de siècle, defiant killer plants and destructive alien visitors were just some of the striking motifs deployed to reimagine anxieties surrounding foreign invasion and human control. From weird fiction to popular science, from painting to illustration, nineteenth-century makers engaged the horrors — but also potential pleasures — of such cross-species entanglements. New paganisms, folk horror, and the ecogothic emerged as just some of the modes which dramatized the vengeance of oppressed human and other-than-human subjects, as well as the tainted global ecosystems they inhabited.

By interrogating the natural horrors of our recent past, this workshop will explore how ecological anxieties of the Anthropocene were first galvanised by deep-rooted nineteenth-century fears. P

Programme  (Central European Time)

CNCSI Nature and Horror Programme

9.45am - 10.00am: Professor Bennett Zon (Durham University), Welcome Address

10am - 10.45am: Dr Jonathan Greenaway, ‘Zola the Horror writer? Labour, Nature and Germinal as eco-gothic’

Chair: Dr Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou (University of Paris 1–Panthéon Sorbonne)

10.45am - 11.00am Break

11.00am - 11.45am: Dr Joan Passey (University of Bristol), ‘Vampires on the Beach: Queer Gothic Ecologies at the Coastline’

Chair: Alice Dodds (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

11.45am - 12.00pm Break

12.00pm - 12.45pm: Dr Eleanor Dobson (University of Birmingham), ‘“Familiar[s] of the deep”: shipwrecks, horror and the animal from The Wreck of the Titan to Titanic’

Chair: Professor Robert Rix (University of Copenhagen)

12.45pm - 2.00pm Lunch Break

2.00pm - 2.45pm: Daisy Butcher, ‘Tree Mothers, Hollow Women and Flower Maidens: The representation of plant-women in George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and Jane G. Austin’s “Prince Rudolf’s Flower” (1859)’

Chair: Dr Emma Merkling (Durham University)

2.45pm - 3.00pm Break

3.00pm - 3.45pm: Professor Matthew Wynn Sivils (Iowa State University), ‘Conjure and Rot—Ecogothic Decay in Charles Chesnutt’s Plantation Tales’

Chair: Dr Emily Vincent (Durham University / University of Birmingham)

4.00pm - 4.45pm: Dr Janette Leaf (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Gothic Insects Creeping Out the Nineteenth Century’

Chair: Katrina Jan (University of Birmingham)4.45 – 5.00 pm: Dr Emma Merkling (Durham University), Closing Remarks