CNCSI Workshop Halloween Workshop- Nineteenth-Century Gothic Afterlives

Date: Friday 31st October

Time: 9.00 am  ̶  5.00 pm (Central European Time)

Location: Online

Registration: Coming Soon

Event Description: The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CN-CSI) is pleased to announce a one-day interdisciplinary workshop on Halloween (Friday 31st October) exploring how the global afterlives of nineteenth-century Gothic art, media, and culture continue to haunt our multimedia present. 

From dark digital adaptations of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843), to whimsical animated revivals of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887), and innumerable reimaginings of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) through renderings of Nosferatu, Van Helsing, and even the count’s ship, the Demeter, nineteenth-century Gothic imagery has left an indelible global footprint on our cultural imagination. As Fred Botting emphasises, these ‘ghostly returns of the past’ turn audiences inwards as they reveal both ‘fearful and exciting incursions of barbarity’, but also expose ‘primitive and archaic forces deeply rooted in the human mind’. Modern audiences across the globe continue to return to – and crucially, update – the doppelgängers, ghosts, and vampires of our nineteenth-century past in order to reframe a beleaguered present plagued with hauntingly similar uncanny anxieties. 

With a focus on a wide range of multimedia adaptations, receptions, revivals, and reimaginings, this workshop will examine the Gothic afterlife of the nineteenth century as seen through modern texts, radio, video game culture, film, television, and artistic practice.