Unseen Academicals: A Discworld and Terry Pratchett Podcast

A quick update about the podcast schedule.

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Our long-awaited second episode on Carpe Jugulum, covering the literary development of the vampire from the early-nineteenth century through to the publication of Carpe Jugulum almost two hundred years later in 1998 and beyond! We discuss Lord Byron (a lot) and his influence on the early vampire characterisation and his influence on other nineteenth-century vampire texts, including the unjustly overlooked Varney the Vampire as well as the more influential Carmilla and Dracula. (After moving house and catching COVID,) we then turn to the twentieth-century, discussing early cinematic iterations on Dracula and the shift toward sympathetic and overly Byronic representations via TV series like Dark Shadows and books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, ending up in the 1990s and the wild experimentation that was going on around Pratchett when he wrote his final Witches book.

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Preview episdoe for our Patreon bonus show Wotcher' Been Reading? where Alice and I discuss the non-Discworld things we've been reading recently.

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Episode 7A of Unseen Academicals, discussing Carpe Jugulum and exploring Pratchett's subversion of the triple goddess, magpie rhymes, Gothic landscapes, modernisation, notions of progress, "quilted" signifiers and more!

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Did you know Alice does another podcast called Of the Devil's Party, where they and their friend Rowan do a deep dive into dark hero archetypes? 

It's really good. You should listen to it! ...It also might help explain what all this "Byronic" stuff we keep talking about is.

On this bonus/preview episode Alice and Rowan begin their discussion of Gothic villains by examining Byron’s 1817 closet drama Manfred and its debt to the Gothic tradition. The pair discuss Byron’s life, work,  and experimentation with dark hero archetypes, and whether there is  actually such as thing as a Byronic Hero. They consider the way Byron  experiments with Dark Heroism by combining existing heroic archetypes  and traditions such as The Wandering Jew, the Child of Nature, The Hero  of Sensibility, Prometheus, Satan, the Gothic Villain and Faustus.

Subscribe to Of the Devil's Party: https://ofthedevilsparty.sounder.fm/

Support Unseen Academicals on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/doctorprometheuspod

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A Doctor Prometheus podcast.

We discuss Maskerade, exploring the origins triple goddess, the many guises of The Phantom of the Opera,distinctions between high and low culture, the gentrification of opera, masks, physical appearances, the archetype of the Gothic Villain and its theatrical transformation into a Romantic Hero of Sensibility and more!

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Our first ever bonus episode of Unseen Academicals, covering issue 19 of Neil Gaiman's comic series The Sandman: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1991). We compare Gaiman's treatment of Shakespeare's titular play to that of Pratchett's Lords and Ladies (1992), while examining the history of Shakespeare in comics and fairy illustration, the Faerie connections to the underworld, Faustian bargains, the history of Puck and his "reverse Pandora," Tolkien's opinions on fantasy and drama, as well as the origins of drag and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and more!

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Our second part on Lords and Ladies, exploring evolving literary and cultural representations of elves and fairies through the works of William Shakespeare, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. H. White, Lord Dunsany, Rudyard Kipling and more!

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Support: patreon.com/unseenacademicals