You can listen to Episode 2 of Season 5 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, "Deal with the Devil" on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps, available via Buzzsprout.

Every year, come hell or high water, The WPHP Monthly Mercury has released a gothic-inflected Halloween episode—and this year, we’re literally taking a trip to hell with Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 novel Zofloya; or, The Moor. To talk about this demonic, orientalist bloodbath, Kandice sat down with WPHP collaborator Kate Ozment, and they found themselves hurled into the abyss of trying to untangle the plot of this most bonkers of bonkers novels. 

Happy Halloween!

 

Credits:

Produced by: Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren

Music by: Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard”, A Collection of New Songs (1769) from https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/bard.jpg, and played by Kandice Sharren.

 

WPHP Records Referenced

Zofloya (title)

Dacre, Charlotte (person)

Austen, Jane (person)

Persuasion (title)

Pride and Prejudice (title)


Works Cited

Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya, ed. Adriana Craciun. Broadview Press, 1997.

—. Zofloya; or, The Moor, ed. Kim Ian Michasis. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

Desjardins, Molly. “‘The Slave of Your Wishes’: Rereading Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806).” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 63, no. 1, 2024, pp. 53–77.

 

Further Reading

Capstick, Alice and Rowan Burridge. "Analogues of Eve: Imagining a Sublime Gothic Heroine in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor (1806)." Gothic Studies, vol. 25, no, 1, 2023, pp. 20-41.

Craciun, Adriana. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge UP, 2003.

Crockett, Christine. "Medical Gothic: Genre and Gender-Bending in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2013, n.p.

Lim, Jane. "'Open House': Hospitality and Decentred Subjects in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor (1806)." Eighteenth Century Life, vol. 48, no. 3, 2024, pp. 120-42.