Michael Newton

I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor and essayist, with a strong interest in our engagement with representations of the state of nature and with ‘the fantastic’, whether in art or in life. I am the author of two books of cultural history, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (Faber & Faber, 2002; Picador USA, 2004) and Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (Faber, 2012). On film, I have written Show People: A History of the Film Star (Reaktion, 2019) and three books for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series, on Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003), Rosemary’s Baby (2020), and It’s A Wonderful Life (2023). I have edited Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (2004), Victorian Fairy Tales (2015), and an anthology, Origins of Science Fiction (2022) for Oxford World’s Classics, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (2007) and The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (2010) for Penguin Classics. With Evert Jan van Leeuwen, I have edited Haunted Europe (Routledge 2019), a book of critical essays on how Britain has imagined Europe as a Gothic space.

Research
I am presently writing a cultural history, Blithe Spirits and Demon Lovers: A History of Hauntings, Visitations and Other Encounters with the Supernatural World, both for Oxford University Press – and an essay on George MacDonald’s fairy romances for a book of essays on the body in Victorian fantasy literature.