Amongst the chimera at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Moulins is a sublime Werewolf gargoyle. French werewolves include the Gandillon family executed in 1598; the female Auvergne werewolf, recorded in Discours des Sorciers 1602 and the infamous Jacques Roulet, a victim of France’s werewolf trials. British werewolves differ from their French counterparts in that they are rooted within haunted landscapes, often appearing as wolf phantoms. In fact, British folklore is unique in representing a history of werewolf sightings in places in Britain where there were once wolves.
In this talk, Professor Sam George draws on theories of the weird and the eerie in a revealing analysis of the representation of werewolves in contemporary myth. Professor George will depart from psychoanalytic studies which tie the werewolf to the ‘beast within’: moving into a theory that roots werewolves in landscape and absence in the present. The result is a landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present (a spectred, rather than ‘a scepter’d isle’). Interrogating the werewolf as spectre wolf, brings the creature within the realms of the weird and the eerie and situates it firmly within gothic modes. This is the climate in which the spectre of the UK werewolf has re-emerged (rising from the ashes of the flesh and blood wolf).
Sam George
Sam George is Associate Professor in Research at the University of Hertfordshire and the convenor of the popular Open Graves, Open Minds Project. She is known as the ‘coffin boffin’ on social media (@DrSamGeorge1); her research specialisms include werewolves, wolves and wild children and the history of the literary vampire. Her interviews have appeared in newspapers from The Guardian and The Independent to the Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Post, and the Wall Street Journal. She’s a regular contributor to The Conversation, amassing 176,364 reads for her articles on vampires and werewolves alone. She recently appeared on Radio 4s ‘In Our Time’ speaking on the first fictional vampire.
Her work with OGOM has led to a number of co-edited publications with Dr Bill Hughes: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2012); In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children (2020); The Legacy of John William Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (2022) and the forthcoming collection ‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Faerie Realm in Literature and Culture. Sam also co-edited the first ever issue of Gothic Studies on ‘Vampires’ in 2013 and ‘Werewolves’ in 2019.
| Ticket | Event time | Cost |
|---|---|---|
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Werewolves and the Gothic
In Search of the Spectre Wolf |
13:30 - 15:00 | £13.20 |
Address
Brompton Cemetery Chapel, North gate off Old Brompton Road, South gate off Fulham Road, London, SW5 9JE
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West Brompton (Tube)
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