Tales from the Dark Continent: Resurgence of the Romance in the Digital Age

Stories situate themselves at the juncture between meaning and being, offering embodied encounters with the complexities of thriving versus merely surviving in current times. I have been interested in the gothic as a representation of the potency and powerlessness at the core of the woman’s experience, ways in which these stories invite the possibility of a re-telling of the woman’s story in her own terms and reclaiming disparaged meanings from the mire. In current times, there is an assault on embodied truths that threatens to leave us even further disenfranchised from what we might know from our own experience. How then, might we envision the heightened interest in the romance, as a genre, as a point of insurrection, a possible rallying cry that might help to salvage the profoundly human values and aesthetically driven meanings from the disparagement inherent in relegating the feminine to the terrible morass of the dark continent? And how might we challenge the move toward empty rhetoric and arm ourselves with truths carried from these deeper realms to survive and perhaps even thrive in these very dark and dire times?