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Please join us for the final Italian Studies research seminar of this term, with , Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, whose talk is entitled,

‘Seeing Double: Pompeii, the Gothic Imagination and Anglophone Archaeological Fantasy’.

Dr Dobson’s talk crosses disciplines and will speak to research across the Faculty (see below).

The seminar is in FAB5.03 from 5-7pm on Tuesday 17^th March. All welcome!

Abstract 

This talk begins by examining the formative role of Italy – its ruins, excavations, and mythicised landscapes – in shaping the early Anglophone Gothic imagination, inspiring texts by British authors responding to Italy from afar or through travel. Beginning with Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) – often pinpointed as the first Gothic novel – not only situates itself in an Italian setting but also frames its narrative through the faux rediscovery of a supposedly Neapolitan incunabulum, the talk opens by establishing how Italy’s material past became a catalyst for eighteenth‑century Gothic sensibilities. Walpole’s own encounters with the excavations at Herculaneum and, after his death, the transfer of Pompeiian artefacts from his collection to that of William Beckford (author of the Gothic-Orientalist fever-dream Vathek [1798]), further illuminate how the nascent discipline of archaeology informed the concerns of the Gothic as the genre emerged and crystallised.

Pompeii provides the most striking early example of this convergence. Systematically excavated from 1748, the site offered not only classical architecture and artworks but the profoundly uncanny traces of the dead themselves. The impression of a woman’s breast found in 1772 and, later, Giuseppe Fiorelli’s plaster casts of victims frozen in the moment of death (pioneered from 1863) themselves inspired countless poetic and artistic engagements that reveal a persistent cultural impulse to animate, aestheticise and even romanticise the dead. Such bodily ‘doubles’ (and counterparts immortalised in text) embody the Freudian uncanny: simultaneously human and not‑human, corpse and artefact, subject and object. In later literature and travel writing to which the talk then turns – from Felicia Hemans to Mark Twain, and subsequently in cinema – Pompeii (re)emerges as a site where archaeology performs a kind of Gothic resurrection, collapsing temporal strata and confronting audiences with the persistence of a perpetually haunting past.

By situating these Anglophone responses within Italy’s central role as both physical site and cultural imaginary, I argue that archaeology in Italy did not merely influence Gothic literature: it offered the quintessential terrain through which British and American writers – even when geographically distant – conceived of their own uncanny encounters with history, materiality and the dead. Subsequently, even in diverse genres, we see Pompeii retain a singular Gothic gravity, a place where ancient and modern bodies repeatedly surface as uncanny doubles of one another.