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Witches have a long history in horror cinema but their status (feminist heroine or patriarchal monster?) continues to be the subject of critical debate. Barbara Creed’s seminal analysis notes that the witch is invariably represented as an old, ugly, crone. Elsewhere, Linda Williams’s suggestion that women and monsters share an affinity in horror film and pose a threat to vulnerable male power, has lead recent critics to consider depictions of the witch as offering a challenge to patriarchy. This article considers the genealogy of the witch in cinema through her depiction in folk horror, culminating in an analysis of Robert Eggers’s 2016 film, The Witch. Examining the debate around the feminist potential of the witch, the article concludes that she offers critics and viewers of horror cinema a troubling ambiguity that serves neither liberal nor conservative politics. The ambiguity of the witch means she can pressed in the service of competing discourses. Moreover, we cannot read the image of the witch independent of her origins in Early Modern history, nor of political and cultural contexts of these early decades of the twenty-first century. These contexts include the rise of the ‘Men’s Rights’ movement, a post-feminist backlash against women in authority, the creation of mainstream media platforms for misogynist ideas and rising economic and social inequalities that have disproportionately affected women. In these contexts, the figure of the witch looms large and ambiguity in itself is not necessarily subversion. As one reviewer of The Witch notes, the audience will see what they want to see.

Witches have a long history in horror cinema but their status (feminist heroine or patriarchal monster?) continues to be the subject of critical debate. Barbara Creed’s seminal analysis notes that the witch is invariably represented as an old, ugly, crone. Elsewhere, Linda Williams’s suggestion that women and monsters share an affinity in horror film and pose a threat to vulnerable male power, has lead recent critics to consider depictions of the witch as offering a challenge to patriarchy. This article considers the genealogy of the witch in cinema through her depiction in folk horror, culminating in an analysis of Robert Eggers’s 2016 film, The Witch. Examining the debate around the feminist potential of the witch, the article concludes that she offers critics and viewers of horror cinema a troubling ambiguity that serves neither liberal nor conservative politics. The ambiguity of the witch means she can pressed in the service of competing discourses. Moreover, we cannot read the image of the witch independent of her origins in Early Modern history, nor of political and cultural contexts of these early decades of the twenty-first century. These contexts include the rise of the ‘Men’s Rights’ movement, a post-feminist backlash against women in authority, the creation of mainstream media platforms for misogynist ideas and rising economic and social inequalities that have disproportionately affected women. In these contexts, the figure of the witch looms large and ambiguity in itself is not necessarily subversion. As one reviewer of The Witch notes, the audience will see what they want to see.

Since the turn of the twenty first century, Gothic has emerged as one of the most popular forms in which to write for children. Although children’s literature critics and educational professionals were once dubious about the value of scary stories for children, postmillennial Gothic has begun to receive critical praise as well as mass market popularity. This thesis explores an emergent critical discourse that champions children’s Gothic alongside a variety of examples of the form. I argue that postmillennial children’s fiction employs metafictional reflexivity and explicit intertextuality, opening out into an expansive Gothic landscape. Unhoming its protagonists, readers and critics, postmillennial children’s Gothic challenges existing paradigms in both children’s literature criticism and Gothic Studies. Foremost, this fiction disrupts accounts of children’s literature that assign the form a pedagogical function, and that construct the child reader according to linear narratives of maturation offered by psychoanalysis and ego-relational psychology. In place of the ‘psychoanalytic child’, postmillennial children’s Gothic imagines a nomadic subject, constructing child protagonists and readers across a multiplicity of subject location and identities. There is not one child, but multiple figurations. The transgressive and liberating energies of Gothic play a part in this rejection of traditional figurations of the child. However, postmillennial children’s fiction also challenges critical commonplaces in Gothic Studies. The nomadic project of children’s Gothic runs counter to the melancholic figuration of subjectivity offered by a deconstructive psychoanalytic discourse that informs some analysis of Gothic literature. Unlike the tragic subjectivity of the Gothic wanderer, the nomad offers an affirmative figuration of being. The nomad is transformed through interrelationships with others, likewise transforming the locations through which it travels, suggesting new ways of

Chris Priestley’s 2011 novel, Mister Creecher, promises to show ‘the making of a monster ...’ Set in 1818, the novel is a metafictional rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), imagining the monster’s journey as he tracks his creator to Scotland. In this version, the monster is aided by London pickpocket, Billy, whose provenance, the early novels of Charles Dickens, suggests further intertexts for this contemporary novel. It is Billy, rather than the eponymous ‘Creecher’, who is the novel’s protagonist: a sentimentalized, suffering Dickensian child, whose narrative is reconfigured through encounters with Shelley’s gothic novel and a range of other intertexts. Through Billy, Mister Creecher (2011) re-imagines Dickens’ children and the Dickensian bildungsroman, reconfiguring the positions of villain and innocent. Neo-Victorian texts have been characterized by a doubled relationship to their intertexts, a relationship that is parasitic on the one hand, revisiting the traumas of a past reconstructed as barbaric, and redemptive on the other hand, since these reconstructions are usually aimed at a revisionist critique. In the case of Mister Creecher (2011) the parasitic relationship of contemporary metafiction to past gothic and Victorian works is a part of the novel’s active intertextual fabric. This is a novel that explores how intertextuality itself functions as a corrupting parasite, problematizing and infecting any future encounter with back-grounded works. The introduction of Shelley’s creation into Dickens’ landscape is a wilfully contradictory gesture. On one hand, the doubling of Billy with Shelley’s monster provides a reverse bildungsroman, an account of villainy as social rather than simply essential or sensational, with reference to notions of family and childhood relevant in the contemporary moment. On the other hand, the monster’s invasion of Dickensian London is an aggressive act of gothic contagion or colonization, one akin to that imagined by Fran

This article uses readings of the abject body and writing as supplement in Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, The Icarus Girl (2005) to argue against a critical trend that reads the postcolonial Bildungsroman as promising a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Through our reading of Oyeyemi’s novel, we suggest that locating the debates and tropes conventionally mobilized within postcolonial gothic in the former colonial centre complicates subject formations and constructions of alterity. The Icarus Girl weaves together a Western literary tradition of gothic with the postcolonial Bildungsroman and we suggest that the interaction of these forms produces a reading focused on the abject, both in terms of physical abjection mapped onto bodies and places, and in the way writing functions as abject supplement. When bodies, borders, and writing disintegrate, the reading of the novel becomes a difficult process, one not easily co-opted into a critical discourse that tends to value a psycho-symbolic reading of the postcolonial gothic Bildungsroman and to promise a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Accordingly, we argue that The Icarus Girl is unable to find comforting resolutions, disrupt oppositional structures, and create a utopian hybrid space or to bring about a unified sense of self, meaning that it resists a redemptive or cathartic ending. We draw upon Kristeva’s theories of the abject and Derrida’s notion of the supplement in order to establish how Oyeyemi’s novel resists the construction of a stable identity through its emphasis upon expulsion and disintegration. Unlike the majority of criticism on postcolonial gothic, which focuses on texts emanating from formerly colonized countries, this article considers what happens to postcolonial gothic when it is written within and about the former colonial centre. In The Icarus Girl the repercussions of the colonial period are experienced in the present day through experiences of racism, dislocation, and alienation w

Chris Priestley’s 2011 novel, Mister Creecher, promises to show ‘the making of a monster ...’ Set in 1818, the novel is a metafictional rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), imagining the monster’s journey as he tracks his creator to Scotland. In this version, the monster is aided by London pickpocket, Billy, whose provenance, the early novels of Charles Dickens, suggests further intertexts for this contemporary novel. It is Billy, rather than the eponymous ‘Creecher’, who is the novel’s protagonist: a sentimentalized, suffering Dickensian child, whose narrative is reconfigured through encounters with Shelley’s gothic novel and a range of other intertexts. Through Billy, Mister Creecher (2011) re-imagines Dickens’ children and the Dickensian bildungsroman, reconfiguring the positions of villain and innocent. Neo-Victorian texts have been characterized by a doubled relationship to their intertexts, a relationship that is parasitic on the one hand, revisiting the traumas of a past reconstructed as barbaric, and redemptive on the other hand, since these reconstructions are usually aimed at a revisionist critique. In the case of Mister Creecher (2011) the parasitic relationship of contemporary metafiction to past gothic and Victorian works is a part of the novel’s active intertextual fabric. This is a novel that explores how intertextuality itself functions as a corrupting parasite, problematizing and infecting any future encounter with back-grounded works. The introduction of Shelley’s creation into Dickens’ landscape is a wilfully contradictory gesture. On one hand, the doubling of Billy with Shelley’s monster provides a reverse bildungsroman, an account of villainy as social rather than simply essential or sensational, with reference to notions of family and childhood relevant in the contemporary moment. On the other hand, the monster’s invasion of Dickensian London is an aggressive act of gothic contagion or colonization, one akin to that imagined by Fran

Since the turn of the twenty first century, Gothic has emerged as one of the most popular forms in which to write for children. Although children’s literature critics and educational professionals were once dubious about the value of scary stories for children, postmillennial Gothic has begun to receive critical praise as well as mass market popularity. This thesis explores an emergent critical discourse that champions children’s Gothic alongside a variety of examples of the form. I argue that postmillennial children’s fiction employs metafictional reflexivity and explicit intertextuality, opening out into an expansive Gothic landscape. Unhoming its protagonists, readers and critics, postmillennial children’s Gothic challenges existing paradigms in both children’s literature criticism and Gothic Studies. Foremost, this fiction disrupts accounts of children’s literature that assign the form a pedagogical function, and that construct the child reader according to linear narratives of maturation offered by psychoanalysis and ego-relational psychology. In place of the ‘psychoanalytic child’, postmillennial children’s Gothic imagines a nomadic subject, constructing child protagonists and readers across a multiplicity of subject location and identities. There is not one child, but multiple figurations. The transgressive and liberating energies of Gothic play a part in this rejection of traditional figurations of the child. However, postmillennial children’s fiction also challenges critical commonplaces in Gothic Studies. The nomadic project of children’s Gothic runs counter to the melancholic figuration of subjectivity offered by a deconstructive psychoanalytic discourse that informs some analysis of Gothic literature. Unlike the tragic subjectivity of the Gothic wanderer, the nomad offers an affirmative figuration of being. The nomad is transformed through interrelationships with others, likewise transforming the locations through which it travels, suggesting new ways of

The witch child manifests at the intersection of history and fiction, revealing as uncanny our desire to know a ‘real’ child. This paper explores representations of the witch child in BBC 4’s 2011 documentary, The Pendle Witch Child, and Joseph Delaney’s fantasy fiction series, The Wardstone Chronicles, to argue that recent representations of witch children that attempt to ‘recuperate’ the image of the innocent-child-as-victim are destabilised by the uncanny presence of a witch child who resists this recuperation. The desire to know a real, historical child operates within a binary construction, oscillating between desire for the Romantic innocent and fear of the self-possessed child of gothic horror. The uncanny witch child that emerges from this conflict is finally embraced only by Fantasy, whose disregard for historical truth and veracity allows space for the construction of childhood to inhabit a multiplicity of possibilities.

The witch child manifests at the intersection of history and fiction, revealing as uncanny our desire to know a ‘real’ child. This paper explores representations of the witch child in BBC 4’s 2011 documentary, The Pendle Witch Child, and Joseph Delaney’s fantasy fiction series, The Wardstone Chronicles, to argue that recent representations of witch children that attempt to ‘recuperate’ the image of the innocent-child-as-victim are destabilised by the uncanny presence of a witch child who resists this recuperation. The desire to know a real, historical child operates within a binary construction, oscillating between desire for the Romantic innocent and fear of the self-possessed child of gothic horror. The uncanny witch child that emerges from this conflict is finally embraced only by Fantasy, whose disregard for historical truth and veracity allows space for the construction of childhood to inhabit a multiplicity of possibilities.