Gresham College Lecture: Fiction and the Supernatural

Gresham College Lecture: Fiction and the Supernatural

From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented the Gothic Novel. In this lecture, part of a superb series on the Powers of the Novel, Professor John Mullan looks at the gift of Gothic to later novelists, seeing how great Victorian novelists like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens were entranced by the supernatural. Finally, it looks at how the possibility of supernatural explanation energises contemporary novelists like Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters.

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