Mathias Clasen, PhD, is an associate professor of literature and media in the English Department at Aarhus University. He co-directs the Recreational Fear Lab, focusing on the psychology of horror and recreational fear. Clasen’s notable publications include Why Horror Seduces (OUP, 2017) and A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies (OUP, 2021). His research is deeply interdisciplinary, often using empirical methods to explore recreational fear and the psychology of how horror media impacts psychological resilience and emotional coping.
The New Science of Recreational Fear
Historically dismissed as psychologically harmful, morally questionable, and aesthetically trivial, horror entertainment has gained new recognition as a valuable cultural phenomenon. This talk presents the latest interdisciplinary research from the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, illuminating horror and other recreational fear experiences as potentially beneficial avenues for engaging with fear. By exploring recent studies, the talk will reveal how horror entertainment may foster mental and physical health benefits, such as resilience, emotional regulation, immunological response, and social bonding, making it a vital part of popular culture. Through controlled, playful encounters with fear, individuals find unique opportunities for coping with an uncertain world, challenging traditional views that have long stigmatized horror. This emerging perspective not only highlights the aesthetic and psychological appeal of horror but also underscores its emerging role as a socially and personally beneficial form of entertainment.
Attila Kiss, DSc is Professor of English and Head of the English Department at the University of Szeged, where he is also co-director of REGCIS, the Research Group for Cultural Iconology and Semiography. His research interests include English Renaissance drama and early modern theatricality, iconology, postmodern drama, and the poststructuralist theories of the speaking subject. His publications include Contrasting the Early Modern and Postmodern Semiotics of Telling Stories (Edwin Mellen, 2011), and Double Anatomy in Early Modern and Postmodern Drama (Szeged: JATEPress, 2010). The focus of his current research is on the representations of anatomy and corporeality in English Renaissance revenge tragedies.
“What Strange Riddle Is This?” Anatomical Theatres and Theatrical Anatomies in Early Modern England
The rise of the New Historicism and performance-oriented semiotic approaches in the 1980s drew attention to the fact that the early modern English dramatic canon should be examined in the light of the representational logic and the everyday material practices of the contemporary theatre. At the same time, it should also be embedded in the cultural semantics of which the theatrical institution was a part, similarly to the technological innovations and experiments, and the rites, procedures, and social customs rewritten by the epistemological and thanatological crisis. Sinc then, research has been ongoing into the technology that expanded the boundaries of cognition, the Protestant theology that reformulated the fundamentals of semiotics, and the power antagonisms of the Anglican Church which balanced between conflicting religious currents. These investigations have also been rewriting and dislocating the Renaissance literary canon. More and more dramas by Shakespeare’s “melodramatic” contemporaries are brought under the scrutiny of theoretical approaches that can lend these plays a coherent, intriguing structure of meaning and a new canonical status. In my presentation, I will highlight some of the striking analogies in the parallel development of (pre)dramatic theatres and anatomical theatres, and I intend to explicate how the analysis of Henry Chettle’s revenge drama The Tragedy of Hoffman, one of the long-marginalized “decadent” plays of the Renaissance canon, can be facilitated if we read it against the contemporary anatomical practices and performances.
Biljana Mišić Ilić, DSc is a Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia. Her academic interests include pragmatics, discourse analysis, contact linguistics, cognitive linguistics and contrastive studies of English and Serbian. She has published 2 monographs, 4 university textbooks, more than 80 papers in scholarly journals and collections, co-edited three thematic volumes for Cambridge Scholars Publishing and more than 20 thematic volumes and conference proceedings for the University of Niš. She was the President of the Serbian Association for the Study of English (SASE) and a member of the Board of European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) (2009-2019), and is currently the Secretary of ESSE (2020-2026).
Image Schemas and Metaphors in Idioms Denoting Happiness: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective
In the framework of cognitive linguistics, emotion concepts have been convincingly shown to be metaphorically structured. Such metaphoric conceptualizations are rooted in universal bodily experiences, while cross-linguistic variations are the result of various types of contexts. In our metaphorical conceptualizations, particularly significant are image schemas, generally understood as abstract topological conceptualizations, recurring dynamic patterns of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that give coherence and structure to our experience. In this talk, I will examine some familiar English idioms related to happiness (walk on air, be on cloud nine, feel on top of the world, be full of the joys of spring, etc.), and their translations into various languages, some of which are idiomatic and/or lexical near-equivalents. From both apparently similar and disparate examples, it may be possible to establish a potential connection between the well-known identifiable conceptual metaphors they are based on (happiness is up, happiness is a fluid/substance contained in the body, happiness is motion), and more basic and general image schemas underlying them (force moving something upwards, verticality). Moreover, I will propose that even these specific image schemas may be grounded in higher order conceptual primitives (discrete distance points and a unidirectional path), which can set the elementary cognitive basis for the unified interpretation of both lexically similar and diverse, idiomatic and non-idiomatic metaphorical expressions denoting happiness.
Ágnes Péter, CSc is Professor Emerita of English at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. Her research focuses on the Romantic Age, its critical theory and European contexts. Her books include a comparative assessment of Shelley and Hölderlin against the critical background of German Frühromantik (Késhet a tavasz? Tanulmányok Shelley poétikájáról, 2005), a monograph on the shifting concepts of nature, language and beauty in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats (Roppant szivárvány, 1996); a study on the world of Keats (Keats világa, 1989, 2010), and a book on William Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job (…ezentúl egybeforr ég, föld s pokol…William Blake illusztrációi a Jób könyvéhez, 2017). Her latest work explores the contribution of the early feminist writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, to the Romantic concept of the imagination (A függetlenség ára. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley öröksége, 2022).
“The Ineffable Delight of the Union of Affection and Desire” – The Contribution of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley to the Romantic Concept of the Imagination
Although scholarly interest seems to have been focussed now for a number of years on exploring the intellectual kinship between Mary Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith, and despite the fact that in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Adam Smith is treated by Wollstonecraft as a “respectable authority”, a “cool reasoner” and a „celebrated writer,” the ethics and the vision of Smith’s „impartial spectator” are directly discredited in the pamphlet, and in her moral system the personal engagement with the world appears to be the prerequisite of the individual’s becoming a moral being. „The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we just mix in the throng, and feel as men feel before we can judge of their feelings. If we mean, in short, to live in the world to grow wiser and better, and not merely to enjoy the good things of life, we must attain a knowledge of others at the same time that we become acquainted with ourselves—knowledge acquired in any other way only hardens the heart and perplexes the understanding. I may be told, that the knowledge thus acquired, is sometimes purchased at too dear a rate. I can only answer that I very much doubt whether any knowledge can be attained without labour and sorrow.” (Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution,ed. Janet Todd, Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 188–9.). In my presentation I would like to discuss how that effects Wollstonecraft’s redefinition of Smith’s main virtues and how that eventually led to the construction of an erotic concept of the imagination which is parallel with/anticipates William Blake and Percy Shelley’s notion of love as well as of the imagination.
