Following the phenomenal success of the Gothic Manchester Festival 2013, which launched the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, we are back with a new programme of events and activities designed to showcase MMU’s academic expertise in the gothic and foreground Manchester’s rich vein of gothic talent. Included in this festival of the macabre and fantastical are readings from authors working on the gothic dimensions of austerity politics, tours of the John Rylands Library and of the gothic splendours of the city and author Rosie Garland reading from both of her novels and discussing her alternative life as Goth icon Rosie Lugosi. As if this were not already a surfeit of transgressive pleasure, we also have a Vampire-themed pub quiz, a phantasmagoric lantern display and film screening, and the local Steampunk community will join us for a day of retro-tech delights, including a costumed tour of the Museum of Science and Industry’s Steam Hall. If you delight in the darkness, you are sure to find something here to sink your teeth into!

Thursday 23rd October 2014:
Gothic Curiosity Shop
Gothic Romance and the Phantasmagorical
Friday 24th October 2014:
Twisted Tales of Austerity
What is This Thing Called Steampunk?
Memento Moriatas
VictoriArA!
Saturday 25th October
Gothic Spaces/Gothic Places Festival Conference and wine reception
Sunday 26th October 2014:
Gothic Manchester Tour
Rosie Garland
John Rylands Tour
Monstrous Manchester Tour
Fang Cafe
Weds 23rd – Sun 26th:
Aerial Burglars of Cottonopolis

Convened by Dr Linnie Blake

Dr Linnie Blake is Principal Lecturer in Film in the Department of English, Director of The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and Pathway Leader for the MA English Studies – The Gothic. Her work on literary, filmic and televisual texts ranges across genres, national cultures and historical periods. She has published widely on topics as various as seventeenth century Puritanism and zombie apocalypticism, Edgar Allan Poe and the Situationist International, Hillbilly Horror and Post 9/11 Republicanism, Japanese and Thai horror cinema and the contemporary Gothic box set. She is the author of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: MUP, 2008) and is working on a second monograph: Gothic Television in a Neoliberal Age as well as an edited collection – Neoliberal Gothic (for Manchester University Press) and a Contemporary Horror Reader (for Edinburgh University Press).

The Gothic Manchester Festival is a proud supporter of the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, and we will be selling wristbands and providing information about alternative lifestyle and hate crime throughout our events.