Event Details

Sara Wasson discusses her prize-winning recent book, Transplantation Gothic, with Dale Townshend. Transplantation Gothic, a shadow cultural history of fantasies of tissue transfer under neoliberal capitalism, won the International Gothic Association’s Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize in 2022.

Dr Sara Wasson (Lancaster) discusses her recent book, Transplantation Gothic: Tissue transfer in Literature, Film, and Medicine, with Prof Dale Townshend (Man Met).

(https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526132864/)

Transplantation Gothic, a shadow cultural history of fantasies of tissue transfer under neoliberal capitalism, won the International Gothic Association’s Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize in 2022.

Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.

Sara Wasson is Reader in Gothic Studies at Lancaster University.

Dale Townshend is Professor of Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and Chair of the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize.