3 February 2016

Alison Gibbons (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)

Multimodality, Genre, and Consumer Culture: Reading Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör

Quirk Books, the publisher of Grady Hendrix’s (2014) Horrorstör, portray the novel on their website as “a traditional haunted house story” but also mention that it “comes conveniently packaged in the form of a retail catalog”. Such description points to two generic foundations: the horror novel, which is manifested primarily through the novel’s literary themes and linguistic style, and the retail catalogue, signalled chiefly through the novel’s multimodal design features. In this paper I argue that in order to account for Horrorstör both as literary experience and as “sly social commentary” (as Quirk books claim), consideration and analysis of genre is vital. The paper subsequently offers a cognitive stylistic approach to multimodal literary genre analysis. In doing so, it presents a reading of the novel as a literary artefact: as fiction and as commodity.

Alison Gibbons is Senior Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University, and her research pursues a stylistic approach to innovative and contemporary narratives. Alison is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (Routledge 2012), and co-editor of Mark Z. Danielewski (MUP 2011) and the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge 2012). She is also co-editing two forthcoming volumes: Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth (Rowman & Littlefield 2017) and Pronouns in Literature: Perspectives and Positions in Language (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).