Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Edited Collection, Call for Papers
Famed for their scandalous content and supposed pernicious influence on a young readership, it is little wonder why the Victorian penny dreadful was derided by critics and, in many cases, censored or banned. These serialised texts, published between the 1830s until their eventual decline in the 1860s, were enormously popular, particularly with working-class readers. As Judith Flanders has highlighted in The Invention of Murder(2011), for every publisher of “respectable fiction”, there were ten for penny fiction. However, despite their evidential popularity, these texts have fallen into obscurity; this could be accounted for perhaps due to their ephemeral nature with many titles being lost or incomplete, alternatively this could be the effects of literary criticisms from writers such as Charles Dickens and James Greenwood overspilling into contemporary scholarship. Neglecting these texts from Gothic literary criticism creates a vacuum of working-class Gothic texts which have, in many cases, cultural, literary and socio-political significance. This collection aims to redress this imbalance and critically assess these crucial works of literature.
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