Birds in Houses: Transforming Haunted Domestic Space Into Haunted Work Space in Canadian Horror Fiction
- Date: Friday, March 16, 2018 - 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Room: Bagnani Lecture Hall
The Twenty-Sixth Annual Margaret Laurence Lecture
Birds in Houses: Transforming Haunted Domestic Space Into Haunted Work Space in Canadian Horror Fiction will be delivered by Suzette Mayr, of the University of Calgary.
This paper will examine The Dwelling by horror writer Susie Moloney, and my own recent novel Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall as two Canadian novels that revisit the “haunted house” genre with the inclusion of not just haunted domestic spaces, but also haunted workspaces. Using as a springboard the more well-known American haunted house text, The Amityville Horror, I will draw on the haunted house depicted in fiction such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a novel famous for its depiction of a house that is “alive,” but, I will suggest, also memorable for its blurring of the domestic “home” space with the workspace. Indeed, I will argue that a significant part of the horror of haunted workspace novels such as The Dwelling, Dr. Edith Vane, as well as Peter Norman’s Emberton is that the characters must accept that the workspace is the home space; eventually, characters are manipulated into never going home.
A reception to follow in Bagnani Hall. All welcome.
Suzette Mayr is the author of five novels including her most recent book Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall. Her fourth novel, Monoceros, won the ReLit Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, was longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize, and nominated for a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. She has done inter-disciplinary work with Calgary theatre company Theatre Junction, visual artists Lisa Brawn and Geoff Hunter, and she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary and at Widener University, Pennsylvania. She is a former president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
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Posted on February 26, 2018