Halloween, thought to be rooted in the Gaelic harvest festival Samhain, is seen as a time for ghosts, ghouls, and all things terrifying. Contemporary celebrations of Halloween often include trick-or-treating, costume parties, visiting haunted houses, watching horror films, and of course, telling scary ghost stories. But some of these activities are not limited to October 31st. Horror movies fill movie theatres all year round, and vampires and zombies are pervasive in popular culture.
Where does this enjoyment in scaring ourselves come from? Dr. Elizabeth Way, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, talks with me about Gothic literature and how the elements of this genre have influenced the literature and popular culture of today.
Dr. Way specializes in British Romanticism and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and teaches courses in British and world literature, the Gothic, and science fiction. She holds graduate degrees in English from the University of Georgia and the University of Durham in England, where she spent a year as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar; she also holds a graduate certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Elizabeth has published on Mary Seacole, contributed book reviews for Gothic Studies and Romanticism, and is serving as the invited editor for the forthcoming entry on Seacole in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism. Her current book project, Romantic Compositions: A Poetics of Home and Exile in Women’s Writing, 1789-1832, is a formalist and cultural study of how gender and genre inflect portrayals of home and exile in texts by Romantic women writers.
