A Fiend in the Furrows’ is a three-day conference in association with the School of English and the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queen’s University Belfast, exploring ‘folk horror’ in British and Irish literature, film, television, and music. The event will include academic papers, film screenings, musical performances, and readings.
Supernatural and horrific aspects of folklore inform the Gothic and weird writings of M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and Lord Dunsany, where philosophical and religious certainties are haunted and challenged by the memory of older cultural traditions. Folklore has a profound and unsettling impact on the imaginative perception of landscape, identity, time and the past. Folk memory is often manifested as an intrusive and violent breach from an older repressed, ‘primitive’ or
‘barbarous’ state that transgresses the development of cultural order. Gothic and weird fictions are burgeoning as the focus of serious academic enquiry in philosophy
and literary criticism, and the genres continue to have an impact on popular culture.
