Dr. Carol Margaret Davison
Women’s and Gender Studies Programme
Department of Interdisciplinary and Critical Studies
Publications between January 2022 and January 2024:
NOVELS –
Davison, Carol Margaret. Bodysnatcher. Glasgow, Scotland: Ringwood Publishing, 2023.
Bodysnatcher is a he-said/she-said Gothic historical romance novel with a few diabolical twists that recounts the untold story of the Burke and Hare murders. These shocking serial killings in the impoverished West Port of Edinburgh (Little Ireland) in the late 1820s by William Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants, involved 16 individuals whose corpses were sold to Dr. Robert Knox for anatomical dissection and the purposes of medical instruction. While Burke was publicly hanged and dissected after their arrest and trial where Hare turned King's Evidence, the role of their two female partners, who claimed to be ignorant of the crimes, continued to be debated. Central to the tale is the unravelling of the mystery of the 17 curious dolls (1 more than the number of murder victims) in small, ornately decorated wooden coffins discovered in the north-east range of Arthur’s Seat some eight years after the murders, dolls currently on display in Edinburgh’s Scottish National Museum.
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
EDITED BOOKS/ESSAY COLLECTIONS –
Davison, Carol Margaret. Gothic Dreams and Nightmares. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2024. [Forthcoming in January 2024]
This interdisciplinary collection of twelve essays by international scholars combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of literary, artistic, and televisual works, both classic and lesser known, to investigate how the Gothic and the concepts of dreams and nightmares have intersected and been configured cross-culturally and to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day
BOOK SERIES PUBLICATIONS
ANTHEM STUDIES IN GOTHIC LITERATURE – SERIES EDITOR (Carol Margaret Davison)
1) Krzywinska, Tanya and Ruth Heholt. Gothic Kernow: Cornwall as Strange Fiction. PUBLISHED January 2022.
2) Ringel, Faye. The Gothic Literature and History of New England
PUBLISHED February 2022.
3) Leffler, Yvonne. Swedish Gothic.
PUBLISHED November 2022.
4) Flores-Silva, Dolores and Keith Cartwright. Gulf Gothic.
PUBLISHED November 2022.
5) Armitt, Lucie and Scott Brewster. Gothic Travel Through Haunted Landscapes.
PUBLISHED December 2022.
6) Hirst, Holly. Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764-1834.
PUBLISHED July 2023.
7) Crow, Charles. California Gothic: The Dark Side of the Dream.
PUBLISHED January 2024.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Davison, Carol Margaret. “Introduction. Gothic Parasomnias and Oneirocriticism: The Sleep, Dreams, and Nightmares of Enlightenment Reason.” In Gothic Dreams and Nightmares. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2024.
This chapter introduces each of the twelve chapters in this volume by first laying out some foundational intellectual history relevant to the intersections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oneirocriticism and the Gothic. The essay then grounds the collection, advocating for a reconsideration of the vastly under-theorised role of the subliminal in the Gothic that extends beyond the dominant, problematically Freudian reading that claims the external sublime mutated into, or was increasingly displaced by, an internalised sublime over the course of the nineteenth century. After delineating how the Gothic was itself often oneirically inspired, thematically focused on dreams and nightmares, and comprised of oneiric elements and atmospherics, a line of inspirational transmission and aesthetic experimentation with the subliminal is traced – usually signposted by the artists themselves – from one artistic work to the other, across two centuries. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s incorporation of Piranesi’s ‘sublime dreams’ into The Castle of Otranto, this trajectory ranged across early Gothic literature, to Romantic poetry, Fuseli, Goya, late eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, into nineteenth-century Gothic, especially its monsterpieces, into the era of the Surrealists and early twentieth-century silent film and German Expressionist cinema, late twentieth-century horror films, television series, video games, and other media.
Davison, Carol Margaret. “Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating In/Upon the Graveyard, Meditating Among the Tombs.” In Daniel K. Jernigan, Neil Murphy, and M. Michelle Wang. The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Routledge, 2022. 276-87.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Davison, Carol Margaret. “Houses of Terror, Castles of Despair: Nightmarish Necropoetics and Necropolitics in the Victorian Workhouse.” Victoriographies 13 (3): November 2023. 256-76
This essay brings Achille Mbembe’s intellectually trenchant theory of necropower to bear on the early Victorian era’s most despised and iconic institution known as the workhouse, arguably one of the most preeminent emblems of democracy’s nocturnal body located within Britain. Regarded by many of its critics as enacting the Utilitarian, inhumane, and ‘mechanistic’ treatment of the poor, the workhouse was frequently portrayed by way of the Gothic mode as a necropolitical institution, a death manufactory that monstrously combined prison, factory, asylum, slaughterhouse, and dead house – some of society’s most dehumanizing, disciplinary, and dreaded locales. Taking posters, illustrations, broadside ballads, penny dreadfuls, and novels as its primary sources, this essay examines the workhouse through socio-political, economic, and theological lenses, considering, where relevant, scholarship in the rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary field of Thanatology Studies. It contextualises Workhouse Gothic in relation to Victorian Christian beliefs and attitudes towards death, dying, mourning, and memorialisation, phenomena and concerns that span both sides of the grave, and discusses what was at stake in those cultural narratives in relation to domestic and national values, and the development of working-class identity, subjectivity, and class consciousness.
