CNCSI Online Event -Nature and Horror in the Nineteenth Century

The Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CN-CSI) is pleased to announce a one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the relationship between nature and horror in nineteenth-century culture across the globe.

If it was at the end of the century that horror as a genre truly came into its own, its first stirrings began much earlier. Throughout the nineteenth century — from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844), to Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Giant Wistaria’ (1891) — depictions of haunted land- and seascapes possessed by monstrous and hybrid forms demonstrated an international cultural fixation with the natural world and the uncanny other-than-human agencies which populated it. Alongside the emergence of the first formulations of ‘ecology’, scientists, writers, and artists began to grapple anew with humankind’s profound interrelatedness with its environment. At the same time, vast environmental changes wrought by industrialisation, colonial expansion, and epidemic disease were destabilising nineteenth-century environments on a global scale. By the fin de siècle, defiant killer plants and destructive alien visitors were just some of the striking motifs deployed to reimagine anxieties surrounding foreign invasion and human control. From weird fiction to popular science, from painting to illustration, nineteenth-century makers engaged the horrors — but also potential pleasures — of such cross-species entanglements. New paganisms, folk horror, and the ecogothic emerged as just some of the modes which dramatized the vengeance of oppressed human and other-than-human subjects, as well as the tainted global ecosystems they inhabited.

By interrogating the natural horrors of our recent past, this workshop will explore how ecological anxieties of the Anthropocene were first galvanised by deep-rooted nineteenth-century fears. We encourage papers engaging with any aspect of nature and horror in the nineteenth century worldwide, especially those grappling with its global dimensions and ecocritical aspects.

Programme

[TBC]

All sessions are scheduled according to Central European Time.