Sara Wasson's Transplantation Gothic

Dr Sara Wasson (Lancaster University) in conversation with Professor Dale Townshend (Manchester Metropolitan University), in celebration of winning the 2022 Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for her book Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film and Medicine.
Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.