Animal Gothic with Dr Lauren Cullen

In the nineteenth century, animals hopped, flew, leaped, bounded, and clawed their way from the margins and into the hearts and minds of the reading public. But what were these creatures doing there? This talk argues that animals played surprisingly active roles in Gothic fiction: they were not merely ornaments or plot devices, but also commodities, family members, victims, criminal accomplices, and detectives—and sometimes sat uncomfortably within more than one of these categories. We’ll explore how animal-human encounters in Gothic fiction became formal strategies for encoding mystery, anxiety, and suspense while also foregrounding the importance of animal characters. In these stories that centre violence, crime, and monstrous behaviour, animal presence provokes the destabilisation of the human to ask, who is a brute?