Speaker: Dr Kevin Corstorphine, Lecturer in American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Culture and Education.

Abstract:

This talk will examine Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella The Wendigo and Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary, as well as other works of horror and supernatural fiction. It follows the work of ecologically-minded critics such as Simon C. Estok, who argues that human interactions with the environment have been characterised not just by destruction, but by a mindset of ‘ecophobia.’ The particular fearful focus of this discussion will be the figure of the mythical Wendigo, which inhabits both a place within specific Native American traditions and the imagination of the colonial settlers of North America. The Wendigo is a spirit characterised by cannibalism, and is highly evocative of the destructive greed of the coloniser and of human treatment of nature in general terms.

Biography:

Dr Kevin Corstorphine lectures in American literature at the University of Hull and has a particular interest in horror and Gothic fiction, literary and popular. His research interests are mainly centred on representations of space and place, including haunted houses, tainted and abject spaces, thresholds and forbidden rooms. He is currently writing a cultural history of haunted house stories, and has published on many authors of the weird and macabre such as Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, H P Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Clive Barker. Together with Laura Kremmel, he is the editor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018).

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This talk is part of ‘Gothic Nature’ Tea-Time Talk Series

This series of talks celebrates the research and teaching of the Faculty of Arts, Culture and Education at the University of Hull.

 

Cost: Free Admission – All welcome but booking is required in order to guarantee a place and to enable us to ensure we have an adequately sized room booked for the session. 

Enquiries:  opencampus@hull.ac.uk

Telephone: 01482 466585

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The OpenCampus is a programme of research-led public engagement which showcases the work of our fantastic research staff and talented PhD students. You can attend one session or all the sessions in a series.  Sessions are informal and friendly and are not traditional public lectures.  We do not charge for admission to sessions so we utilise the University's normal teaching spaces when they are not required for student teaching (lecture theatres and seminar rooms).  We try to provide access to one of the University Cafes as part of the experience, but cannot guarantee this. We try to time sessions to meet the needs of the majority of our learners. We like to accommodate the needs of all attendees (seen and unseen needs) by having a comfort break at each session.   We may offer specialist one off sessions for which we may make a charge.

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