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Dr Catherine Spooner

Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Degree: BA (Hons) Oxford; MA University of London; Ph.D University of London

Associated research centres and groups: Literature and Film, Literature and Gender, Literature and Location, Literature and Popular Culture

Current Teaching

Catherine Spooner teaches widely across the fields of Victorian, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature within the department. She currently convenes the second-year 'Victorian Literature' course, the third-year half-unit 'Victorian Gothic', and the MA module 'Contemporary Gothic'.

Research Interests

Catherine Spooner specialises in Victorian and contemporary literature and culture, and her particular research interests incorporate Gothic literature, film, and popular culture, and fashion and dress in literature.

Catherine's first book, Fashioning Gothic Bodies, published in 2004 by Manchester University Press, explores the relationship between fashion discourses and constructions of the body in Gothic texts, from the French Revolution to contemporary Goth subculture. It examines the ways in which the bodies represented in Gothic novels and films are influenced by historically specific debates about clothing, from the flimsily-attired heroines of the late eighteenth century, through the lunatics and dandies of the nineteenth century, to the Goths of the late twentieth century.

Her second book, Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion 2006), reflects her continuing interest in the relationship between Gothic and material culture. With discussion ranging from the significance of Gothic images in advertising to the exploitation of Goth style in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it investigates in a variety of twenty-first century contexts what it means to go 'Gothic Shopping'. Click here for a review of Contemporary Gothic in Art Review, and here for a review in Cultural Sociology. Contemporary Gothic was translated into Korean in 2008.

The Routledge Companion to Gothic, a collection of 26 essays by some of the major researchers in the field, co-edited with Emma McEvoy of the University of Westminster,was published in 2007. Click here for a review in Oscholars.

Catherine is currently working on a new monograph entitled Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, to be published by Continuum. The book will explore such phenomena as the perennial revival of Gothic style on the high street, the advent of the sparkly vampire, and Gothic tourism in Whitby, in relation to developments in twenty-first century subcultures. She is also co-editing two collections of essays inspired by the Ninth Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association, 'Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects', July 21-24 2009, which she co-organised with Professor Fred Botting of Lancaster's Institute of Cultural Research.

Read an interview with Catherine on the University of Stirling's Gothic Imagination website hereand her guest blog on the same site here.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Catherine has previously supervised two Ph.Ds to completion and currently has seven Ph.D students: Eleanor Beal is working on religion, femininity and the Gothic; Malgorzata Drewniok on the language of vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Alan Gregory on masculinity and violence in contemporary Gothic; Xavier Aldana Reyes on pain and affectivity in contemporary Gothic; David McWilliam on monstrosity and crime in contemporary American Gothic; Cara Patrick on masculinity and TV vampires; and Neal Kirk on new media technologies and hauntings. She also runs the Contemporary Gothic Reading Group, which meets once a fortnight to discuss texts chosen by the participants and is open to all postgraduates and staff across the university. She welcomes Ph.D applications related to any aspect of Gothic literature and culture, or to literature and fashion, and is happy to consider interdisciplinary proposals.

Career details

Catherine completed her BA at the University of Oxford, and her MA and Ph.D at Goldsmiths College, the University of London. She has previously worked part-time at Goldsmiths College, and full-time at University College Falmouth and the University of Reading, before coming to Lancaster in 2004.

Publications

Books

Contemporary Gothic (Korean edition), (Seoul: Samunnangeok Press, 2008)

The Routledge Companion to Gothic, co-edited with Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007).

Contemporary Gothic (Focus on Contemporary Issues series), (London: Reaktion, 2006).

Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

Edited journals

Guest editor, special issue on 'Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture', Gothic Studies 9/1 (May 2007)

Articles

'Foreword' to Twenty-First Century Gothic ed. Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell and Caroline Ruddell (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press 2010)

'[T]hat eventless realm': Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black and the ghosts of the M25', in London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination, ed. Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard (London: Continuum 2010).

'The Haunted Lecture Theatre: Ghosts in the Academy in the BBC's Sea of Souls' in Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture ed. Esther Peeren and Maria del Pilar Blanco (London: Continuum 2010)

'Crime and the Gothic', in The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Lee Horsley and Charles Rzepka (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2010)

'Dark Looks: An Interview with Valerie Steele', Horror Studies 1/1, October 2009

'On Parasols', in Fleur de Sel: An Installation, ed. Steve Messam and Hannah Stewart (Kirkby Stephen: FoldPress 2009)

'Goth Boys in the Media: Femininity and Violence' in The Men's Fashion Reader ed. Andrew Reilly and Sarah Cosbey (New York: Fairchild Books 2008).

'"Spiritual Garments": Fashioning the Victorian Seance in Sarah Waters's Affinity', in Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature ed. Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy Carlson (New York: Cambria Press 2007).

'Undead Fashion: Nineties Style and the Perennial Return of Goth', in Goth: Undead Subculture ed. Michael Bibby and Lauren Goodlad (Chicago: Duke University Press 2007).

'Angela Carter', 'Emma Tennant', and 'Counterculture and Literature' in The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature ed. Steven Serafin and Valerie Grosvenor Myers (New York: Continuum 2003).

'Cosmo - Gothic: the Double and the Single Woman' in Women: A Cultural Review (Vol. 12, no. 3, winter 2001, 292-305).

Associated Keywords: Advertising and the media, Cinema, Consumption, Contemporary literary studies, Contemporary literature, Contemporary popular culture, Cultural geography, Cultural theory, Culture and media, Dress and literature, English, Fashion, Fashion and literature, Film, Genre fiction, Ghosts, Gothic culture, Gothic film, Gothic literature, Hauntings, Lancashire, Landscape, Literature, London in fiction and film, Nineteenth-century culture, Nineteenth-century literature, Novel, Place-writing, Popular culture, Postmodernism, Postmodern literature, Subculture, The graphic novel, The novel, Twentieth-century culture, Twentieth-century literature, Twentieth-century popular culture, Victorian culture, Victorian literature, Visual culture, Youth subculture

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