The art and photography of writer-scholar Terry Castle —once described
by the late Susan Sontag as “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today” —is deeply informed by her life as a teacher, researcher and collector.
Her many academic interests (she has taught in the humanities at Stanford for over 30 years) include 18th- and 19th-century British fiction, the Gothic novel, the history of the First World War, modernism, English art and culture of the 1920s and 1930s, autobiography and memoir, psychoanalytic theory, and gay and lesbian writing. She is particularly fascinated by the art and theory of the uncanny, and the theme is ubiquitous in her intellectual work.
These same preoccupations reappear both in her own artwork and in the kinds of objects she collects: illustrated books, outsider art, puppets, antique toys, paper ephemera, and early photography--especially tintypes, cartes-de-visite, magic lantern slides and old postcards. Visual strangeness, 'throwback' scenarios, antiquarianism, and the object-worlds of the past remain a continual source of inspiration for her and profoundly shape her unusual, if not eccentric, creative endeavors.
Castle has written eight books and had her visual work shown and published in numerous places. Her last book--The Professor and Other Writings--appeared in 2010 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in San Francisco.
