Literature and Languages

Pathfoot A23

School of Arts and Humanities

Division of Literature and Languages

University of Stirling

Stirling

FK9 4LA
Scotland

UK

I was appointed to a Lectureship in Gothic and Romantic Literature at Stirling in 2006, having been a post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of English Studies from October 2003.  My primary research interests are in British culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Within this broad historical period, I am particularly interested in all manifestations of the Gothic aesthetic (romances; drama; poetry; chapbooks; painting; architecture); Romantic poetry; the manifold interactions between literature and architectural form; the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic; constructions of childhood and children’s literature of the period; and appropriations of Shakespeare in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  I am currently extending my research interests in eighteenth-century appropriations of Shakespeare into the early modern period itself, with a forthcoming edited collection on Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Continuum, 2013)  Though invariably committed to an historicist mode of literary-critical approach, I also have strong research interests in critical theory, particularly in French post-structuralism (Jacques Derrida; Roland Barthes; Jacques Lacan; Julia Kristeva; Michel Foucault) and its legacies in the work of a number of contemporary European critical theorists and theories (Giorgio Agamben; Slavoj Zizek; trauma studies; queer theory).  I am a founding member of the peer-reviewed journal Horror Studies, and sit on the editorial boards of Studies in Gothic Fiction and the Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies.

My publications to date have reflected these interests and preoccupations.  In addition to a number of essays and book-chapters, I am the author of The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing, 1764-1820 (AMS, 2007).   I have also co-edited, with Fred Botting, four volumes in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series (Routledge, 2004), and, with John Drakakis, Gothic Shakespeares (Routledge, 2008).  I currently have articles and book chapters forthcoming on such topics as Byron and Ghosts; Shakespeare and the Gothic, from the eighteenth century to the present day; Gothic architectural repair in late eighteenth-century politics, journalism and romance; T. J. Horsley Curties and biography; and Shakespeare, Ossian and the problem of ‘Scottish Gothic’ in the eighteenth century.   

My current research project, provisionally entitled Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1740–1845, seeks to provide a sustained critical account of the complex but hitherto relatively unexplored relationship between ‘words’ and ‘stones’, texts and architectural structures in British Romantic-era writing.  With a particular interest in the varying constructions of the British nation’s Gothic past at the turn of the nineteenth century, this study seeks to read a number of key Romantic authors, both canonical and otherwise, in relation to such contemporary discourses as the political ‘myth’ of Gothic origins; formal historiography and its vexed relations to romance; stylistic tracts on Gothic architecture; and Antiquarian attitudes to the tangible physical remains of British history as manifested in so many ruined Gothic architectural structures. 

At undergraduate level, my teaching is distributed across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Augustan; Romantic; Victorian), with forays into the field of modern and contemporary Gothic fiction.  Together with Glennis Byron, I run and teach on the MLitt in The Gothic Imagination, a highly successful one-year taught Masters Programme on the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day.  I have supervised PhD theses on appropriations of Gaston Le Roux’s Phantom of the Opera and Gothic appropriations of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, and am currently supervising work on such topics as ‘Gothic modernism’ and the novels of Graham Swift.  I’d welcome proposals from prospective Doctoral students on any aspect of my research interests.   

Claire Fabbri - Shifting Vision in the Novels of Graham Swift

Matthew Foley - Haunting Modernisms: Manifestation of the Spectral and the Apparitional in Modernist Literature (1919-1938).