Tuesday Talks: 'Magic and the Gothic' by Professor David Punter | The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre

The Gothic, often known as the ‘literature of terror’, and magic have had a long association. Professor David Punter talks about a few twentieth and twenty-first-century Gothic novels, by writers like Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Dennis Wheatley, Shirley Jackson, Iain Banks, M. John Harrison, Susanna Clarke and F.G. Cottam. All of them have to do with magic, which is to say that they approach the question of the supernatural, although from very different perspectives. They all have something to say about the afterlife, which was of course one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s major preoccupations. Some of them express belief; some do not - but the best leave it up to readers to decide for themselves. The supernatural, perhaps, is everywhere; does ritual magic, though, give us an insight into one of Conan Doyle’s preferred terms, the ‘preternatural’?