Bill Hughes
Co-organiser of the Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture Project at the University of Hertfordshire.
In the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, we unearthed depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifters and other supernatural beings and their worlds. OGOM opens up questions concerning genre, gender, hybridity, cultural change, and other realms. The Project extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical.
I was awarded my PhD in English Literature by research at the University of Sheffield in 2010. My research is on the eighteenth-century dialogue as a genre and on the dialogic nature of Enlightenment thought in general. I have also published on Richard Hoggart. I am currently doing research and publishing on contemporary paranormal romance' fiction, and on the use of Linked Data to represent intertextuality. I am continuing my work on communicative rationality and the Enlightenment dialogue in relation to the formation of the English novel. This apparently disparate research is not unfocussed; it has at its core my concerns with the Enlightenment as viewed through the theory of Habermas and the Marxist tradition.
My thesis begins with an exploration of eighteenth-century theories of language, many of which posit an originary dialogue. I consider Mandeville’s theories in The Fable of the Bees, James Harris’s Hermes, Lord Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language, and, briefly, Adam Smith, Condillac, and Rousseau.
The second chapter considers the harmonious, consensual, and hedonistic nature of some eighteenth-century dialogues by looking at Aphra Behn’s translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, A Discovery of New Worlds; Shaftesbury’s The Moralists; Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees once more; and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
The thesis then explores the antagonistic, polemic nature of dialogues, looking at Berkeley’s Alciphron, and some neglected dialogues of the 1790s, both radical and conservative; Thomas Day, Sir William Jones, Thomas Spence, and in response, writers such as Hannah More.
Finally, I depict the absorption of the genre into the novel: Richardson’s Pamela, Sarah Fielding’s The Cry, and novels of the 1790s, radical and anti-Jacobin, such as Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, are treated in depth. The overall argument reveals a new facet of the ‘Rise of the Novel’ debate; my thesis being that the richness of the eighteenth-century dialogue, owing much to the dialogic context within which it flourished, contributed significantly to the development of the novel.
Supervisors: Dr Hamish Mathison
In the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, we unearthed depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifters and other supernatural beings and their worlds. OGOM opens up questions concerning genre, gender, hybridity, cultural change, and other realms. The Project extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical.
I was awarded my PhD in English Literature by research at the University of Sheffield in 2010. My research is on the eighteenth-century dialogue as a genre and on the dialogic nature of Enlightenment thought in general. I have also published on Richard Hoggart. I am currently doing research and publishing on contemporary paranormal romance' fiction, and on the use of Linked Data to represent intertextuality. I am continuing my work on communicative rationality and the Enlightenment dialogue in relation to the formation of the English novel. This apparently disparate research is not unfocussed; it has at its core my concerns with the Enlightenment as viewed through the theory of Habermas and the Marxist tradition.
My thesis begins with an exploration of eighteenth-century theories of language, many of which posit an originary dialogue. I consider Mandeville’s theories in The Fable of the Bees, James Harris’s Hermes, Lord Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language, and, briefly, Adam Smith, Condillac, and Rousseau.
The second chapter considers the harmonious, consensual, and hedonistic nature of some eighteenth-century dialogues by looking at Aphra Behn’s translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, A Discovery of New Worlds; Shaftesbury’s The Moralists; Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees once more; and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
The thesis then explores the antagonistic, polemic nature of dialogues, looking at Berkeley’s Alciphron, and some neglected dialogues of the 1790s, both radical and conservative; Thomas Day, Sir William Jones, Thomas Spence, and in response, writers such as Hannah More.
Finally, I depict the absorption of the genre into the novel: Richardson’s Pamela, Sarah Fielding’s The Cry, and novels of the 1790s, radical and anti-Jacobin, such as Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, are treated in depth. The overall argument reveals a new facet of the ‘Rise of the Novel’ debate; my thesis being that the richness of the eighteenth-century dialogue, owing much to the dialogic context within which it flourished, contributed significantly to the development of the novel.
Supervisors: Dr Hamish Mathison
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Books by Bill Hughes
A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire’s origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siècle decadence, Nazi Germany and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola’s film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, Goth subculture, young adult fiction and cinema are dealt with in discussions of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and much more.
Featuring distinguished contributors, including a prominent novelist, and aimed at interdisciplinary scholars or postgraduate students, it will also appeal to aficionados of creative writing and Undead enthusiasts."
Papers by Bill Hughes
A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire’s origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siècle decadence, Nazi Germany and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola’s film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, Goth subculture, young adult fiction and cinema are dealt with in discussions of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and much more.
Featuring distinguished contributors, including a prominent novelist, and aimed at interdisciplinary scholars or postgraduate students, it will also appeal to aficionados of creative writing and Undead enthusiasts."
University of Hertfordshire, 8‒11 April 2021
However, Ann Radcliffe’s last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, is introduced by a frame narrative which slips in and out of formal dialogue; a sceptic and a romantic enthusiast discuss aesthetics, superstition, realist representation, and politics. Radcliffe also wrote a dialogue, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, following the earlier model of Clara Reeve’s dialogue The Progress of Romance. This alerts us to the possibility of dialogism elsewhere. I argue that Radcliffe is still very much concerned with the rational argumentation advocated by the Enlightenment and that her frequent use of the word ‘conjectures’ is one clue to this.
Radcliffe, who talks of the ‘forking paths’ of narrative, might be almost as fond of labyrinths as Jorge Louis Borges (she has a ‘labyrinth of misfortune’ and a ‘labyrinth of vice’ in A Sicilian Romance). In the phrase ‘labyrinths of conjectures’ (The Romance of the Forest), Radcliffe associates winding explorations of landscape, architecture, and plot itself with evaluations of modes of argument. Radcliffe’s heroines wander through literal and metaphorical labyrinths, exercising their reason to penetrate the gloom and illuminate the twistings and abrupt concealments of the plots they are subjected to. They are troubled by conjecture, particularly over phenomena (hence, the oft-observed resolution of the marvellous in favour of rational causality), but also over moral arguments and judicial processes, and aesthetic values. Jürgen Habermas, in his analysis of the dialogic process of communicative reason, talks of three types of ‘validity claims’ that may be raised: over factual truth, moral rightness, and aesthetic authenticity. His schema, this paper argues, can illuminate the process of conjecture in Radcliffe’s works.
This paper will unveil some of Radcliffe’s different engagements with dialogism and show how the dialogic spirit colours her writings. This is manifested through an emphasis on rational and mutual conversation but most of all through conjectural evaluations of validity claims infused with the imagery of convoluted plots and winding journeys fraught with obscurity and aporias. Thus the paper stresses Radcliffe’s rationalism at the expense of her adventures into the irrational (without, however, dismissing that other strand, which has already been much explored). Radcliffe’s ‘conjectural labyrinths’ are resolved according to Enlightenment principles of human reason over passion and superstition, illumination over obscurity, and this resolution takes place communicatively through dialogue.
The best known incarnation of this present-day demon lover is the sympathetic vampire, who was probably the first of these paranormal paramours to emerge from the shadows. But werewolves, angels, demons, fairies, trolls, cyborgs, and even the unlikely zombie have become objects of desire in these fictions (in film and TV as well as novels).
Such novels appeal to (or seem intended for) a mainly female and often young adult readership, which has led to some belittlement. But many of them are daringly creative, often questioning, and can be stylishly crafted with considerable literary care. Their presence is of more than sociological interest and the rise of new genres—new possibilities for writing and seeing, in other words—is itself of interest to those who value literature.
Literary monsters nearly always represent some kind of otherness—groups of people or sets of values deemed threatening to some elements of society. Their outsider status may be owing to class, ethnicity, or sexuality. Genres—kinds of writing—themselves correspond to different sets of values and different ways of knowing or looking at the world.
In this talk, I will be giving an overview of the wide range of these stories of loving what is dangerous, alien, and terrifying. I’ll give a brief account of how paranormal romance emerges out of an uncanny mating of the familiar scary Gothic horror and the oft-despised genre of romantic fiction (and other genres, too). Here, we can see what the collision of different perspectives can achieve and how it might be appealing. Through these novels, I’ll show what monsters may mean in today’s culture and what the dangerous loving of them might signify.
Conservative responses to the ‘Jacobin’ novels themselves employed the dialogue as a constituent unit, though the embedded genre often becomes parodied, satirising the enlightened dialogue of intellectual courtship. In the anti-Jacobin novels, the courtship of equals becomes distorted into the strategic action of the rapacious (and rationalist) male seducing the artless female victim.
Elizabeth Hamilton, in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), dramatises this kind of distortion. Her Rousseauvian heroine of sensibility, Julia, is seduced by the Jacobin, Vallaton. Distorted lovers’ dialogues take place between Vallaton and Julia, parodies of the rational exchanges between lovers found in Robert Bage or Thomas Holcroft (though the principal target is Mary Hays). Thus Hamilton revisits the interplay between courtship and intellectual debate of the radical writers, but in order to show the dangers of dialogue; the courtship dialogue is the means by which Jacobins possess both female minds and bodies.
However, much of Hamilton’s critique is of the bourgeois individualism of the new philosophy, where ‘All compose themselves; all play their own tune; no two in the same key’. The socialised sensibility of Shaftesbury has become egotistical and private in the likes of Bridgetina Botherim, the satirised Godwinian, threatening social order. Here, the potential to subvert dialogic mutuality concerns Hamilton though, of course, her fears of the overturning of rank and property motivate the novel. My paper shows how Hamilton’s satire ambivalently serves both the monologic and sociality.
This paper examines the trope and looks at how one of the most inventive vampire storytellers plays with it—Joss Whedon in the shadow-haunted, noir-ish Angel. Representation, as in the realist work of art, is akin to and often synonymous with reflection. In the episode ‘Eternity’, the reflection motif is signalled immediately through Cordelia’s terrible acting in Ibsen’s realist drama, The Doll’s House. The plot concerns an actress afraid of growing old and wanting the immortality of the vampire. The non-reflection of the vampire becomes a device to explore the utopian temptation of overcoming death and age (as also in one moment in Twilight), and simultaneously a self-conscious and witty reflection on the nature of celebrity and of TV itself.
The genre emerged as a new avatar of Horace Walpole’s attempt to fuse ‘two kinds of romance’ as Gothic novel—the mythic strain of Romance proper, with its ‘imagination, visions and passions’, and what later becomes the novel, committed to the quotidian and to psychological verisimilitude. To this may be added a third kind of romance, the everyday sense of ‘romantic fiction’; here, involving the amorous relations of mortal and paranormal creatures, well-known to us through Twilight.
Genres are closely bound up with perspectives, with ways of knowing or questioning. The uneasy mating of romance and novel, paranormal and human, enables a dialogue between the different epistemologies of Enlightenment and its discontents.
This paper will explore how ‘two kinds of romance’, plus a third, enable an exploration of dominant postmodern perspectives and the counterculture that is Enlightenment.
But at the end of the century, social contradictions concealed behind the often-strained benignity of the public sphere suddenly become visible. Democracy is argued about vigorously in the 1790s, often in dialogue form, but the dialogue cannot maintain its polite veneer and it moves towards its logomachic pole, as a rising working class becomes more vocal (and as some argue, creates an alternative public sphere). Curiously, however, this antagonism reinvigorates authentic dialogicity elsewhere. Here, it is useful to employ Habermas’s later work, which contrasts mutual communicative reason with strategic action, where speech becomes manipulative. Gary Kelly has noted the presence of embedded dialogues in ‘Jacobin’ novels; my paper will explore the different modalities of speech exchanges in the novels of writers such as Thomas Holcroft and Robert Bage, and in radical dialogues by Thomas Spence, Thomas Day, and Sir William Jones. These writers expose the hostility towards dialogism of the ruling classes with wit and passion whilst cultivating authentic connections—particularly between the sexes.
But, of course, the famously dominant genre in this period was the novel. The Soviet thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin elevated the novel above all other genres for its dialogic nature; I argue that, in part, the novel is dialogic in a more literal sense and that the eighteenth-century dialogue develops alongside the early novel, overlaps with it, and becomes a constituent element of it. Thus many novels of the period have embedded formal dialogues within them. In fact, the eighteenth-century dialogue is so variegated, and the early novel so multiform and unclassifiable, that it is not just that the dialogue influences the novel, or that dialogue becomes an important component of the novel, but that the two genres overlap considerably.
There were always undercurrents of antagonism behind these sociable exchanges that revealed unresolved divisions in society, but these emerged into open polemic during the 1790s against the background of the French Revolution and dawning working-class consciousness. Dialogues now became openly confrontational in a manner not seen since the period of the seventeenth-century English revolution. Yet some of these radical writings envisaged rational, harmonious communication in a new form alongside the polemicism.
One concern of liberal novelists, those with an interest in women’s aspirations in particular, was the exploration of more egalitarian relationships between the sexes, where mutual attraction also involved mutual intellectual regard. Amorous relations are typically the stuff of the novel and certain novelists envisaged an enlightened commerce of the sexes, finding the incorporation of the formal dialogue a suitable medium for fusing erotic and philosophical speech. Wooing fuses with dialectic as a prelude to an egalitarian and companionate marriage.
My talk will illustrate the fascination of this extraordinarily dialogic age and conclude with the reformulation of dialogue in the radical novels of the 1790s.
But it was in Joss Wheedon’s Buffyverse (at a time, the 1990s, when identity politics in the US and Western world generally became mainstream) that we first saw a world where different undead cultures interact, are tolerated if not granted legal status, or are persecuted for their difference, particularly in Angel, with the Caritas nightclub, or in the various demon joints in Buffy.
On the basis of these possibilities, later texts imagine the consequences of the claims to citizenship of the undead—and two kinds of responses that reveal very common stances on contemporary identity politics: a liberal one and a conservative one. The undead may be legally recognised, or they maybe neglected or even persecuted by the State. I shall examine these polarities in books from two series: the Southern Vampire novels by Charlene Harris (rather than the HBO True Blood adaptation for TV, which handles these themes rather differently), and the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton.
I then consider one of the most dialectically subtle of recent presentations of undead would-be citizens: Daniel Waters’s Generation Dead novel for young adults avoids making obvious points or mechanically allegorising, and reveal the potential illiberal menace of the State, yet also dares to mock certain platitudes of liberal tolerance of difference.
One concern of liberal novelists, those with an interest in women’s aspirations in particular, was the exploration of more egalitarian relationships between the sexes, where mutual attraction also involved mutual intellectual regard. Amorous relations are typically the stuff of the novel and certain novelists envisaged an enlightened commerce of the sexes, finding the incorporation of the formal dialogue a suitable medium for fusing erotic and philosophical speech. Wooing fuses with dialectic as a prelude to an egalitarian and companionate marriage.
Educational writers such as Maria and Richard Edgeworth were committed to dialogic theories of paedagogy; the many educational dialogues written during these years were genuinely open-ended and not the monologic catechisms of other periods, as various writers have shown. The Edgeworths even transcribed actual dialogues with children in Practical Education. Thus we might expect to find that, in Maria Edgeworth’s own novels, the absorption of the dialogue into the novel was coloured by her own educational concerns.
The ‘domestic utopia’ of the Perceval family in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is an instance of the kind of companionate marriage envisaged above. However, the dialogue extends to the whole family, making the links with the Edgeworths’ dialogical paedagogy evident. A constant interplay of educational dialogue between children and parents takes place where the children pursue questions of natural science and of ethics through authentically non-catechistical communication. This episode novelises the familial, paedagogical dialogues that Maria and her father had investigated as a foundation of their educational theory.
Edgeworth’s dialogic interests do not rest there. There are also formal intellectual dialogues between Belinda and, adversarially, Harriet Freke over her distorted variety of feminism; and as a Socratic conversation about lovers with Lady Delacour, thus exploring the terrain of intellectual love that I have identified in the practice of wooing—here, though, as the subject of metadiscourse between women.
This paper will explore the different modalities of dialogic argumentation and education in Edgeworth’s Belinda.
Part of Hoggart’s concern with literature is an affirmation of the idea of literary value and, recently, an attack on relativism. This affirmation is in turn concerned with the power of great literature to complement the generalisations of sociology by concretely dramatising the spirit of a culture.
In addition, literature for Hoggart is a counterbalance to instrumental reason, as shown in his later polemics against philistinism. Thus, literate sociology is more than an analytical method: it is a principled and critical stance against the dehumanisation of society.
This paper shows how Hoggart practices this literate sociology from The Uses of Literacy through Speaking to Each Other whose very structure, divided as it is into a volume on Literature and one on Society, displays this dialectic, to the polemics of The Way We Live Now.
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Steele, in The Tatler, devised dialogues between Bickerstaffe and his young niece, Jenny, to entice young women into an educational process aimed at socialising and containing them. Bernard Mandeville works far more subversively in The Virgin Unmask’d (1709), where a maiden aunt, Lucinda, engages in a dialogue with her young niece, Aurelia, in a digressive tour round the nature of men and matrimony. It is interspersed with a tale about a young woman who defies parental authority, marries for passion, and is then abused and exploited abominably—economically, emotionally, and physically. They also embark, significantly, upon a probing debate on the King of France and political tyranny, explicitly equating this with domestic violence.
Mandeville implicitly admits women to the public sphere, by treating them as fully rational subjects entitled to argue on public affairs. Further, the rhetorical effect of the piece, its novelistic arousal of sympathy, serves to engage the reader on the side of women by defending their rights in the intimate sphere of domesticity.
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Theories of language in this period took a more intersubjective, social approach - opposing the individualistic linguistics of Hobbes and Locke - and some dramatised the origin of speech via an imagi-nary primordial dialogue. In contrast, Hermes seems on the surface to be resolutely asocial and private. It also seems to be unconcerned with the origins or development of language and to ignore the differences between languages and the poetic or non-cognitive aspects of speech. This is largely the case.
However, almost as an afterthought, Harris’s final chapter discusses the development of particular languages and their different rhetorical powers; in English, he detects a heteroglossia that arose out of the concrete history of Britain’s trade and exploration and of dialogue with other tongues. Thus the dialogic is the motive force behind the history and specificity of language; eighteenth-century dialogism, in turn, rests upon the material existence of a thriving, expanding, commercial economy, presided over by Hermes, god of trade and inventor of language.
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As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’ and ‘and favour those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject’. Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), talks of ‘the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies’. ‘Horror’ and ‘terror’ are key terms of affect in Gothic criticism; Townsend urges us, however, to move away from this dichotomy. While we are certainly interested in the darker aspects of fairies and the fear they may induce, this conference also welcomes attention to that aspect of Gothic that invokes wonder and enchantment.
‘Some curious disquiet’: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny
A symposium for the bicentenary of The Vampyre
6-7 April 2019, Keats House, Hampstead
John Polidori published his tale The Vampyre in 1819. It is well known that his vampire emerged out of the same storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati in 1816 that gave birth to that other archetype of the Gothic heritage, Frankenstein’s monster. Present at this gathering were Polidori (who was Byron’s physician), Mary Godwin, Frankenstein’s author; Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley, and (crucially) Lord Byron.
Byron’s contribution to the contest was an inconclusive fragment about a mysterious man characterised by ‘a curious disquiet’. Polidori took this fragment and turned it into the tale of the vampire Lord Ruthven, preying on the vulnerable women of society. The Vampyre was something of a sensation and spawned stage versions and imitations that were hugely popular.
Sir Christopher Frayling declares The Vampyre to be ‘the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre’. Polidori gave the creature the form that largely persists through subsequent vampire narratives, transforming it from the animalistic monster of the Slavic peasantry to something that can haunt the drawing rooms of Western society, undetected. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, modelled on Lord Byron via Lady Caroline Lamb’s scandalous Glenarvon (1818), is aristocratic and sexualised and, though something of a blank canvas, even potentially sympathetic, providing a template for the ‘Byronic hero’ that features in Gothic romance down to the paranormal romances of the present day.
This symposium will trace Polidori’s bloodsucking progeny and his heritage of ‘curious disquiet’ in literature and other media. Guest speakers have been invited to share their research into the many variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori’s seminal textual reincarnation of Byronic glamour. The delegates have been selected for their expertise in the Byronic, the Gothic, and the vampiric. The speakers are: Sir Christopher Frayling, Prof. Catherine Spooner, Prof. William Hughes, Dr Stacey Abbott, Dr Sue Chaplin, Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Prof. Nick Groom, Prof. Gina Wisker, Dr Sam George, Dr Bill Hughes, Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, writer Marcus Sedgwick, and OGOM ECRs and doctoral students Dr Kaja Franck, Daisy Butcher, and Dr Jillian Wingfield.
The Symposium is being held at the beautiful Keats House, Hampstead, home of the poet. The event will include a tour of Keats House (who hold a first edition of The Vampyre) and a trip to Highgate Cemetery, home of the Highgate Vampire (a sensation of the 1970s), and where Karl Marx (who made good use of the vampire metaphor) and others lie.
More details here:
http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/polidori-symposium-2019/
Fees:
£70/day waged; £40/day postgraduate and unwaged
Fee includes all the talks, bespoke catering, including lunch and vampyre cup cakes, tour of Keats House and excursion to Highgate Cemetery.
You can book here:
https://store.herts.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/academic/humanities/some-curious-disquiet-polidori-the-byronic-vampire-and-its-progeny
We are very grateful for the cooperation of Keats House and for generous grants towards the Symposium from the British Association for Romantic Studies, the International Gothic Association, and the University of Hertfordshire.
https://opengravesopenminds.wordpress.com/company-of-wolves/