In 1894, Lord Alfred Douglas referred to homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name”, a phrase that describes the unmentionable nature of homosexuality in a period of time when sodomy was illegal. Even in the 21st century, there continues to be something unspeakable and forbidden about homosexuality. This paper equates the uns…[Read more]

Recent British productions of ghost story theatre have embraced the layering of present onto past. Danny Robins’s 2:22 A Ghost Story demonstrates the haunting of class through gentrification of an East End house through the layers of wallpaper, paint and brickwork in its stage set, but these layers are equally available in its characters, both w…[Read more]

An under-represented area of queer gothic, asexuality may seem at odds with the sweeping romance of Gothic tropes. However, contemporary Gothic texts demonstrate a perverse drawing towards and repulsion from sexual attraction in its asexual and ace-spectrum characters. In Caitlin Starling’s The Death of Jane Lawrence, this repulsion-fascination w…[Read more]