The sublime English wetlands, arguably most strikingly brought to mind by the Cornish coast, the North York Moors, and the Fens of East Anglia, traditionally represent liminal spaces where the boundaries between the land and the sea, the earth and the sky are unstable, impermanent, and constantly blurred. Construed in often bleak and uncanny ways that emphasise the liminal notion of the in-between, these landscapes have for a long time served as the settings for traditional horror genres, such as the ghost story or gothic literature more generally. These time-honoured literary and cultural constructions have been revived recently through the emergence of a number of postmodern genres - coastal gothic, new folk horror, or the English eerie – that continue traditional genre conventions, even as they parody, question and re-write them. In this seminar, then, our aim is to analyse literary representations of the English wetlands as we follow them chronologically through a number of different materials, from M.R. James's ghost stories to more recent texts by Daisy Johnson (Fen), Wyl Menmuir (The Many), Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney), and Robert Macfarlane (Ness).

Please buy and read;
James, M.R. Collected Ghost Stories. 1931. Oxford: OUP, 2013. Print. [selected short stories]
Johnson, Daisy. Fen. London: Vintage, 2016. Print. [selected short stories]
Menmuir, Wyl. The Many. Cromer: Salt, 2016. Print.
Hurley, Andrew Michael. The Loney. London: John Murray, 2014. Print.
Macfarlane, Robert and Stanley Donwood. Ness. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2018. Print.