“Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century
Introductory Speaker: Alison Booth, University of Virginia
Keynote Speaker: Suzy Anger, University of British Columbia
“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
Mary Shelley, 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein
In this truly Gothic year, we celebrate both the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights (1847), two famous Gothic novels which sparked questions regarding the potential of human connections across social classes, time, and death itself. Subsequent authors of Gothic fiction similarly employed this genre to interrogate the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, systems of power and reproduction, sexual, religious, and socio-political taboos and norms, reinterpret previous literatures, and reject contemporary notions of the limits of reality, scientific possibility, and human progress. Given the 19th-century recognition of the Gothic as an unstable, versatile space that can function as a surprising and… read more