Popular Revenants. German Gothic and its International Contexts
Populaere Wiedergaenger. Der Schauerroman im internationalen Kontext.
Symposium at Trinity College Dublin, Friday 18th & Saturday 19th September 2009.
This symposium marks the second phase of a collaborative research project on the
German Schauerroman based at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and at Trinity
College Dublin. While the first phase focused on the Schauerroman as an
emerging phenomenon of popular literature around 1800, the second phase will
examine the various reception patterns of the Schauerroman throughout the
nineteenth century.
If one views Gothic writing as a shadow of modernity, emerging on the threshold
to modern social organization, industrialization and identity, as a mode of
literature which accompanies, uncannily mirrors and distorts whilst also
opening up modes of negotiating and criticizing modernity, then the question
remains as to what extent such patterns of engagement continue to be relevant
beyond the ‘Sattelzeit’ around 1800. Although research on Anglo-American Gothic
has firmly established a continuous line of Gothic writing to the present day,
such a direct line of descent has yet to be traced in the case of the German
Schauerroman. Traditional accounts have seen the earlier Gothic novel disappear
into late- and post-Romantic fantastic literature, although the re-apparition of
such motifs as the double, the spectre and the revenant, and of the tropes of
intrigue and the Monstrous in realist and modernist texts seems to call such a
clean break into question. In addition, the post-1800 reception of German
Gothic writing in France and Germany seems to point towards an almost spectral
afterlife in other national contexts. In the case of the Dublin University
Magazine and other literary magazines this afterlife manifested itself as
intercultural transfer persisting well into the nineteenth century and leading
to the works of Charles Maturin and, later, Bram Stoker.
A central question is how the Schauerroman functions as a site of cultural
transfer and exchange throughout the nineteenth century. Of interest is not
merely the importation of themes and motifs from the sphere of German popular
literature into other national spheres, but also their transformation and
re-importation both in intercultural and other sociohistorical contexts. Under
what conditions do such acts of cultural transfer take place? Are processes of
this kind at the level of popular literature more representative of an emerging
‘Weltliteratur’ than exchange at the level of canonical literature? We are
furthermore interested in the traditions and transformations of Gothic tropes
and forms within German Literature itself. In what respects do monstrous
figures in the second half of the nineteenth century relate to social
discourses of Darwinism, colonialism, emancipation, biopolitics (Foucault,
Agamben)? Are the increasingly spectralizing forms of modernity (Derrida,
Negri) accompanied by Gothic modes around the fin-de-siecle? Can one observe a
domestication of Gothic tropes in post-1848 Realism or Naturalism?
Contributions are welcomed on any of the following topics:
- The fate of the Schauerroman after Romanticism. What is the relationship of
the Schauerroman to the fantastic and realist modes?
- Is there a German form of ‘Gothic Modernism’?
- The Dublin University Magazine as a point for the reception and transmission
of Gothic themes and motifs
- Reception and transmission of the Gothic in other British literary magazines
- Intercultural transfer in Gothic novels by writers associated with the Dublin
University Magazine: Charles Maturin, Charles Lever, James Clarence Mangan,
Bram Stoker
- E.A. Poe’s reception of German Gothic
- The reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann in France and the formation of fantastic
literature
- Gothic motifs in early film and in Expressionism.
We invite contributions from researchers interested in these and related aspects
of the German Gothic as a phenomenon of intercultural exchange. Abstracts, no
longer than 500 words, should be sent by email to either of the organizers by
31st March 2009:
Dr Andrew Cusack, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity
College Dublin: [log in to unmask]
Dr Barry Murnane, Germanistisches Institut, Martin-Luther-Universitaet
Halle-Wittenberg: [log in to unmask]
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