Robert Aickman

This paper offers an analysis of the effect of the supernatural within the genre of the fictional document, how the artist (usually a writer, or filmmaker) reconciles the incorporation of the fantastic into a seemingly realistic medium and any resultant narrative disruption therein, and how the genre has
evolved during contemporary technological history to intricately simulate and also provide commentary on the various forms of media imitated.

This paper will argue that the fictional document is a prescient genre – often taking the form of official documents, video diaries, documentaries, or websites (sometimes devoid of context) - and how its shape as an objective 'artefact' differs from its more literary predecessors such as the frame story, the
discovered manuscript, and the epistolary, by foregrounding its authentic form first and then 'presenting' the supernatural through the form's befitting stylistic conventions and limitations.

By focussing in-depth on four specific texts (two works of literature: Robert Aickman's Pages From a Young Girl's Journal (1975) and China Miéville's Reports of Certain Events Around London (2005), and two two motions pictures: REC (2007) and Troll Hunter (2010)) this paper will present how the significance of supernatural phenomena, used metaphorically, can be utilised in multiple ways to alter and sometimes obscure any received narrative, causing the often pedestrian familiarity of the document's form to become uncanny and alienating. Such occurrences provide commentary not only on contemporary media-fixated concerns arising from taking mass information for granted (and any subsequent misunderstanding arising), but also the risks of desire for knowledge and clarification,
especially within the synthetic hyperreality of digital media, and the effect of assumptions and preconceptions in the pursuit of such understanding.

This dissertation seeks to address the notion of queerness within the Gothic- specifically, within the works of M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman- by redefining and expanding the definition of the term to move beyond sexuality. It is not the authors themselves that are queer, it argues, but the representations of the ghostly figures and the identities of their protagonists that are queer through non-normativity and comparison with contemporary examples. Using work by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on ‘queerness’ in combination with Mark Fisher’s theory of the weird and the eerie, it will show how queer identities are both constitutive and fracturing within the texts, as well as exploring how this is connected with both the presences and absences found within them.
It will first explore the context and history of ghosts and ghostly literature throughout the nineteenth century, as well as offering a survey of the linguistic and theoretical history of the term ‘queer’ and queer theory in general, before using this outline to analyse James, Machen and Aickman in turn. The argument will focus on moving beyond extant criticism on the authors, particularly psychoanalytical analyses, to show how authorial intent and personal biography is not always an essential component of literary criticism. A key component of the argument will be to show how fractured identities- of ghosts that manifest in unfamiliar ways, humans that move between states of being and tensions between past and present, society and nature- work to displace and threaten constitutive identities, introducing weirdness of eeriness into normative spaces. It will conclude with a comparison of the three authors to outline their similarities as well as fundamental differences but showing how, in their contemporaneously different representations of ghosts and ghostly beings and the fractured identities of their protagonists, their ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’ ghost stories are queer in their own way.

A paper presented at the Stirling Arts and Humanties Postgraduate Conference 2020: Heritage and Future(s) on 22/5/2020, adapted from a presentation written in collaboration with Mrs Kristy Strange as part of my MLitt: The Gothic Imagination.

The presentation explored how the locations of Aickman's stories are monstrous, using both hauntology and Jeffery Jerome Cohen's 'Monster Theses' as a critical lens through with to offer a reading of Aickman.

An overview of the development of American and British horror fiction between the end of WW II and the beginnings of the 1970s horror boom. Authors discussed include Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Ira Levin, Ray Russell, John Blackburn, Robert Aickman, William March and Mendal Johnson.