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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'American Gothic'

Author: Grafiati

Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 31 January 2023

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1

Godwin, Hannah. "American Modernism's Gothic Children." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22714.

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This dissertation delineates a range of literary endeavors engaging the gothic contours of child life in early to mid-twentieth century America. Drawing fresh attention to fictional representations of the child in modernist narratives, I show how writers such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter turned to childhood as a potent site for negotiating cultural anxieties about physical and cultural reproduction. I reveal the implications of modernist technique for the historical formation of American childhood, demonstrating how these texts intervened in national debates about sexuality, race, and futurity. Each dissertation chapter adopts a comparative approach, indicating a shared investment in a specific formulation of the gothic child. Barnes and Faulkner, in creating the child-woman, appraise how the particular influence of psychoanalysis on childhood innocence irrevocably alters the cultural landscape. Faulkner and Toomer, through the spectral child, evaluate the exclusionary racial politics surrounding interracial intimacy which impact kinship structures in the U.S. South. Welty and Porter, in spotlighting the orphan girl-child, assess the South’s gendered social matrix through the child’s consciousness. Finally, Faulkner, in addressing children as a readership in his little-known gothic fable, The Wishing Tree, produces a compelling site to examine the relationship between literature written for the child and modernist artistic practice.

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2

Michaud, Marilyn. "Republicanism and the American Gothic." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/110.

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Republicanism and the American Gothic is a comparative study of British and American literature and culture in the 1790s and 1950s. As the title indicates, this thesis explores the republican tradition of the British Enlightenment and the effect of its translation and migration to the American colonies. Specifically, it examines in detail the transatlantic influence of seventeenth and eighteenth century libertarian and anti-authoritarian thought on British and American Revolutionary culture. It argues that whether radical or orthodox, Whig or Tory, the quarrel surrounding the movement from subject to citizen nourishes Gothic aesthetics on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, particularly, the discourse of republicanism articulates not only the nation’s revolutionary goals, but defines national consciousness. This thesis further argues that republicanism is also a panic-ridden ideology, animated by fears of corruption, degeneration, and tyranny, and therefore supplies fertile ground for the development of a Gothic tradition in America. This dissertation then examines the continuing relevance of republican values and discourse in Cold War America. It suggests that the aesthetic, moral, and political imperatives that characterized republicanism in the late eighteenth century re-emerge in the post-war era as an antidote to the contemporary crisis in liberal subjectivity. In the Cold War, Gothic tales featuring doubles, vampires, and conspirators, not only dramatize contemporary fears of communism, conformity, and the rise of mass culture, but also engage with the nation’s historical fears of deception, corruption, degeneration, and tyranny. While grounded in the Gothic novel, this thesis is informed by the theory of republicanism that arose in the post-war years and which came to challenge many of the long held views of American revolutionary history. This thesis attempts to explore the influence of this historical approach on Cold War discourse generally, and on Gothic fiction specifically.

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3

Goode, Aaron T. "American Gothic: A Creative Exploration." University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton155653725057493.

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4

Rivera, Alexandra. "Human Monsters: Examining the Relationship Between the Posthuman Gothic and Gender in American Gothic Fiction." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1358.

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According to Michael Sean Bolton, the posthuman Gothic involves a fear of internal monsters that won't destroy humanity apocalyptically, but will instead redefine what it means to be human overall. These internal monsters reflect societal anxieties about the "other" gaining power and overtaking the current groups in power. The posthuman Gothic shows psychological horrors and transformations. Traditionally this genre has been used to theorize postmodern media and literary work by focusing on cyborgs and transhumanist medical advancements. However, the internal and psychological nature of posthumanism is fascinating and can more clearly manifest in a different Gothic setting, 1800s American Gothic Fiction. This subgenre of the Gothic melds well with the posthuman Gothic because unlike the Victorian Gothic, its supernatural entities are not literal; they are often figurative and symbolic, appearing through hallucinations. In this historical context, one can examine the dynamic in which the "human" is determined by a rational humanism that bases its human model on Western, white masculinity. Therefore, the other is clearly gendered and racialized. Margrit Shildrick offers an interesting analysis of the way women fit into this construction of the other because of their uncanniness and Gothic monstrosity. Three works of American Gothic fiction--George Lippard's The Quaker City, Edgar Allen Poe's "Ligeia," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" portray these gendered power dynamics present within the posthuman Gothic when applied to the American Gothic; the female characters are either forced by patriarchy into becoming monstrous, or they were never fully human in the first place.

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5

Quinn, Caroline. "Dueling Dualities: The Power of Architecture in American Gothic Literature." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/897.

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This article seeks to establish the importance of gothic convention and architecture’s role in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Southworth’s The Hidden Hand. By examining these stories’ dualities this article analyzes Poe and Southworth’s projects behind setting up dual spaces. Specific to Poe, this article follows architecture’s effect on mental health. Specific to Southworth, this article investigates her criticism of binaries and convention and how she uses architecture to shape her analysis.

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6

Schachel, Robert C. "Textual projections the emergence of a postcolonial American Gothic /." [Gainesville, Fla.] : University of Florida, 2006. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/UFE0014882.

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7

Ytterbø, Maren Collier. "American Gothic : En tematisk reise i det amerikanske skrekkuniverset." Thesis, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Institutt for språk og litteratur, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:no:ntnu:diva-23833.

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8

Hillard, Thomas J. "Dark Nature: The Gothic Tradition of American Nature Writing." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/196066.

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"Dark Nature" examines literary representations of fears of nature in American literature, from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Critiquing some dominant trends in ecocriticism, this project fills a gap in the field by studying texts that represent nature as a threatening force. By calling attention to such representations, I identify many of the cultural sources of those anxieties about nature at different historical moments. In the process, this project reveals that there has always been a Gothic subtext in the long history of literature about nature in the United States. "Dark Nature" begins by examining representations of Puritan fears of nature in New England, looking at authors such as William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Mary Rowlandson to show how the Puritan worldview established a "pre-Gothic" way of envisioning nature. It then moves to the post-Revolutionary era, using Charles Brockden Brown's "Edgar Huntly" to describe national anxieties about American wilderness and the ways those anxieties undermined contemporary Enlightenment ideals. The third chapter looks at the "darkness" within the work of that most canonical of nature writers, Henry David Thoreau. Despite the optimism of his Transcendental view of nature, I reveal that Thoreau's writing is often pervaded by moments of anxiety and even fear of the natural world. A further chapter about slave narratives shows how Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs present nature as darker than anything their romantic contemporaries produced, often consciously employing Gothic nature imagery as a rhetorical tool of resistance against their white oppressors. Finally, this study concludes with by exploring how some of Herman Melville's writing exemplifies a changing worldview in light of Charles Darwin's theories about natural selection and survival of the fittest. After the mid-nineteenth century, Gothic representations of nature tend to signal different types of fears based no longer on Puritan conceptions of nature, but rather on a post-Darwinian view. In calling attention to this overlooked lineage of writing, "Dark Nature" helps widen the discourse of ecocritical studies, arguing that there is much to be learned from studying representations of nature that are not only un-Romantic, but outright dangerous, violent, and terrifying.

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9

Springer, Mary Ruth. "American Collegiate Gothic architecture: the birth of a style and its architects, patrons, and educational associations, 1806-1906." Diss., University of Iowa, 2017. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5640.

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Collegiate Gothic architecture can be found on many American campuses, yet its beginnings in nineteenth-century United States are something of a mystery. As the nation’s colleges and universities grew more innovative in their modernized curricula and research, strangely, their architecture became more anachronistic with Collegiate Gothic being the most popular. Around the greens of their campuses, Americans built quadrangles of crenellated buildings and monumental gate towers with stained-glass windows, gargoyles, pointed arches, turrets, and spires, thus transforming their collegiate grounds into likenesses of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Why medievalizing buildings came to represent the archetypal college experience has confounded many educators, scientists, and industrialists, who wondered why some of America’s most revolutionary institutions built libraries and academic halls in a style that seemed to oppose everything that was modern. Scholarship has not fully addressed the reasons why Collegiate Gothic buildings came to occupy so many American college campuses. Authors have not regarded the style in its own right, having its own history within the nineteenth-century’s dynamic developments in higher education, religion, politics, urban planning, and architecture. My dissertation evaluates these relationships by addressing the Collegiate Gothic’s first one hundred years on American campuses from 1806 to 1906.

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10

Li, Wanlin. "Global Ambiguity in Early American Gothic: A Cultural Rhetorical Analysis." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1433333747.

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11

Green, Gary L. "The language of nightmare : a theory of American Gothic fiction /." Full-text version available from OU Domain via ProQuest Digital Dissertations, 1985.

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12

Kuhn, W. J. "Edgar Allan Poe and American gothic literature : a historical study." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.374261.

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13

LaDuke, Aaron J. "Gothic Trends in Contemporary Great Plains Literature." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1368028912.

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14

Kendrick-Alcántara, Carolyn. "Life among the living dead the Gothic horrors of Latin American literature /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1383468231&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

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15

Lyon, Elizabeth Lain. "Mothers, Sons, and the Gothic Family in Brown, Poe, and Wharton." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/67.

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Within Gothic literature, the mother is frequently missing. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleonora,” and Edith Wharton’s “Bewitched,” men are left without parents, and they attempt to recuperate a mother-figure. To do so, the men in these texts psychologically project the role of their mother onto other women. Wives, sisters, and daughters all have the potential to become mothers to these men. This is a catastrophe for the women involved, for male perception fails to distinguish females as autonomous, unique beings. By conflating roles in the family structure, men destroy women and thus are left without the nurturing mother-figure – or indeed any female – they desperately need.

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16

Wilson, Mary E. "Gothic cathedral as theology and literature." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002826.

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17

Hepp, Rebecca. ""A queer sort of chap"| Alternative sexualities in Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novels." Thesis, Villanova University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1553906.

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Brown’s four gothic novels Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (part I, 1799; part II, 1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799) were closely scrutinized by contemporary readers and reviewers alike—and are still of high interest to scholars and gothic writers today. Brown’s contemporary reception and later criticism reveals an ongoing conversation of not only his creation of the American Gothic genre, but his continued influence within American literary circles. Even more recent scholarship on early American sexuality and queer theory has given scholars new ways to understand the unease some contemporary reviewers felt, as well as a unique way to trace Brown’s influence through many of the gothic and sexually charged American novels since his time. A more comprehensive review of his gothic novels, in conjunction with contemporary and subsequent criticism, reveals Brown is not only the originator of the American Gothic genre, but also America’s first author of queer literature.

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18

Weissenberg, Clare. "This is not an exit : reading Bret Easton Ellis." Thesis, University of Essex, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.361020.

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19

Davies, Helen D. F. "Shapes half-hid : psychological realisation in the English and American Gothic novel." Thesis, University of Kent, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.329059.

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20

Jenkins, Jennifer Lei. "Failed mothers and fallen houses: Gothic domesticity in nineteenth-century American fiction." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186122.

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This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.

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21

Parker, Michael Lynn. "Uncanny Capitalism: The Gothic, Power, and The Market Revolution in American Literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/194283.

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In Uncanny Capitalism, I examine works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that incorporate literary elements typically associated with gothic fiction into their depictions of America's capitalist economy. In so doing, I trace a widespread tendency found throughout American literature to some of its earliest and most revealing manifestations, arguing that the gothic lent itself to such uses because eighteenth-century thinkers had long relied upon the fictional mode to represent the divergence between their own commercial societies and the feudal economies of the past. In the course of its development, capitalism occasionally displayed characteristics that linked it with the gothic practices it had supposedly left behind. When it did, my chosen writers used the gothic to represent the convergence between America's commercial economy and its putative other.Chapter one examines the dichotomy that J. Hector St. John de CrÃ¨vecoeur establishes between Europe and America in Letters from an American Farmer that is founded upon two opposing forms of power: an oppressive European one and another that is American and productive. This opposition collapses in the letter devoted to Charles Town where Europe's feudal institutions have made an uncanny reappearance on American soil. Chapter two reads the self-incriminating narrators of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of murder and confession as grotesque examples of the types of coercion upon which the nation's emerging market economy depended in the nineteenth-century. Chapter three examines Frederick Douglass' alternation between the formal techniques of the realist and gothic novels in his 1845 Narrative, and argues that Douglass uses the figure of the gothic monster to apprehend the way in which slavery violates the natural order by commodifying human beings and placing them on a par with the brute creation. I conclude the dissertation with an analysis of the uncanny episodes in The Blithedale Romance that Nathaniel Hawthorne uses to reveal the long reach of the commodity form and the futility of any efforts at escaping the deleterious effects of the market revolution via a Transcendentalist retreat into nature.

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22

Sears, Samantha. "The holy Hermaphrodite| Gender construction, gothic elements, and the Christ figure." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2013. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1523321.

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This thesis explores Julia Ward Howe's unfinished manuscript, The Hermaphrodite (2004). In order to establish a foundation, this thesis begins by approaching The Hermaphrodite through lenses that connect to Howe's life and times. The biographical, feminist, and gothic approaches analyze the effects of personal conflicts, gender concerns, and setting nuances on the manuscript. The analysis of previous treatment of hermaphrodites provides background on ambiguous protagonists. Ultimately, this thesis expands upon and diverges from preceding scholarship, and it establishes a new perspective through which to view the hermaphroditic protagonist, Laurence. This thesis argues that Howe's Laurence can be read as are-visioned Christ figure. His/her physical description is strikingly reminiscent of the accounts of Jesus's appearance. Both Jesus and Laurence are entwined with pious symbols. Laurence is intrinsically connected to the purity of the cross. Most importantly, Laurence and Jesus both gallantly endure burdens and selflessly sacrifice themselves for others while transiently inhabiting earth before returning to heaven. Laurence is an unexpected and reinvented savior.

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23

Liu, Tryphena Y. "Monsters Without to Monsters Within: The Transformation of the Supernatural from English to American Gothic Fiction." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/632.

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Because works of Gothic fiction were often disregarded as sensationalist and unsophisticated, my aim in this thesis is to explore the ways in which these works actually drew attention to real societal issues and fears, particularly anxieties around Otherness and identity and gender construction. I illustrate how the context in which authors were writing specifically influenced the way they portrayed the supernatural in their narratives, and how the differences in their portrayals speak to the authors’ distinct aims and the issues that they address. Because the supernatural ultimately became internalized in the American Gothic, peculiarly within female bodies, I focus mainly on the relationship between the supernatural and the female characters in the texts I examine. Through this historical exploration of the transformation of the supernatural, I argue that the supernatural became internalized in the American Gothic because it reflected national anxieties: although freed from the external threat of the patriarchal English government, Americans of the young republic still faced the dangers of individualism and the failure of the endeavor to establish their own government.

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Janicker, Rebecca. "Halfway houses : liminality and the haunted house motif in popular American Gothic fiction." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2014. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/44082/.

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Halfway Houses examines popular American Gothic fiction through a critical focus on what I call the ‘haunted house motif’. This motif, I argue, creates a distinctive narrative space, characterised by the key quality of liminality, in which historical events and processes impact upon the present. Haunted house stories provide imaginative opportunities to keep the past alive while highlighting the complexities of the culture in which they are written. My chosen authors, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson and Stephen King, use the haunted house motif to engage with political and ideological perspectives important to an understanding of American history and culture. Analysing their fiction, I argue that in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) Lovecraft uses haunting to address concerns about industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation in the early part of the twentieth century, endorsing both progressive and conservative ideologies. Similarly, Matheson’s haunting highlights issues of 1950s suburbanisation in A Stir of Echoes (1958) and changing social mores about the American family during the 1970s and 1980s in Earthbound (1982; 1989), critiquing conformist culture whilst stopping short of overturning it. Lastly, as a product of the counterculture, King explores new kinds of haunted spaces relevant to the American experience from the 1970s onwards. In The Shining (1977) he draws on haunting to problematise inequalities of masculinity, class and capitalism, and in Christine (1983), at a time of re- emerging conservative politics, he critiques Reaganite nostalgia for the supposed ‘golden age’ of the 1950s. At the close of the twentieth century, haunting in Bag of Bones (1998) reappraises American guilt about race and the legacy of slavery. Overall, my thesis shows that the haunted house motif adapts to the ever-changing conditions of American modernity and that the liminality of haunting addresses the concomitant social unease that such changes bring.

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Hale, Alison Tracy. "Pedagogical Gothic : education and national identity in early American sensational fiction, 1790-1830 /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9393.

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Doyle, Dennis M. (Dennis Michael) 1958. "American Gothic: A Group Interpretation Script Depicting the Plight of the Iowa Farmer." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1985. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500827/.

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This thesis examines the possibilities of social-context issues in interpretation. A group interpretation script relating the current difficult conditions of rural Iowa was compiled. Three experts in the field of interpretation were asked to evaluate the potential of this social-context script. It was discovered that a compiled interpretation script of Iowa literature can successfully depict the social concerns facing the family farms of Iowa.

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Beutel, Katherine Piller. "Disembodied and re-embodied voices : the figure of echo in American gothic texts /." The Ohio State University, 1993. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487847309052843.

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28

Gaines, Mikal J. "The Black Gothic Imagination: Horror, Subjectivity, and Spectatorship from the Civil Rights Era to the New Millennium." W&M ScholarWorks, 2015. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1593092099.

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Thomas, Sara Ann. "Subjectivity In American popular metal : contemporary gothic, the body, the grotesque, and the child." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/644/.

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This thesis examines the subject in Popular American Metal music and culture during the period 1994-2004, concentrating on key artists of the period: Korn, Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Tura Satana and My Ruin. Starting from the premise that the subject is consistently portrayed as being at a time of crisis, the thesis draws on textual analysis as an under appreciated approach to popular music, supplemented by theories of stardom in order to examine subjectivity. The study is situated in the context of the growing area of the contemporary gothic, and produces a model of subjectivity specific to this period: the contemporary gothic subject. This model is then used throughout to explore recurrent themes and richly symbolic elements of the music and culture: the body, pain and violence, the grotesque and the monstrous, and the figure of the child, representing a usage of the contemporary gothic that has not previously been attempted. Attention is also paid throughout to the specific late capitalist American cultural context in which the work of these artists is situated, and gives attention to the contradictions inherent in a musical form which is couched in commodity culture but which is highly invested in notions of the ‘Alternative’. In the first chapter I propose the model of the contemporary gothic subject for application to the work of Popular Metal artists of the period, drawing on established theories of the contemporary gothic and Michel Foucault’s theory of confession. The second chapter focuses on instances of violence to the body and the recurrent themes of pain and violence, which are explained through the model of corporeal verification and consensual violence. In the third chapter I explore the contemporary gothic subject in the tradition of the grotesque and the monstrous, drawing on theories of the gothic monster, to suggest that the subject is engaged in a negotiation of the boundaries between self and other. The fourth chapter concentrates on the figure of the child, drawing on theories of horror film and fiction and the tradition of the Evil Innocent and the Gothic child. The final chapter is a case study of Marilyn Manson, exploring his role as a paradigmatic example of contemporary gothic subjectivity.

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Kim, Hyejin. "The Gothic as counter-discourse : Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt and Toni Morrison." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2007. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0001952.

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Tsang, Wai-ho, and 曾煒豪. "Post-9/11 American gothic family in The hills have eyes duology and Twilight saga." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2012. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B48395079.

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9/11 attacks open the 21st Century into the fear of the Other, which is coincidentally at the core of the Gothic tradition. In post-911 Gothic texts, the tension of Self and Other can be seen from the gothic family (representing homeland and country) and the gothic monster (representing foreign, dangerous intruder) respectively. This essay is a close study of two sets of Hollywood films dealing with such tension - Twilight saga and The Hills Have Eyes duology. It is argued, with Foucault’s notion of Power/Knowledge, that such Hollywood gothic productions further create and hence reinforce the fear of, but not suppress, the Other. The 21st Century Gothic genre is therefore no longer subversive, but appropriated to educate the unaware public.
published_or_final_version
Literary and Cultural Studies
Master
Master of Arts

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32

Smith, Dorin. ""Strange American scion of the German trunk"| Charles Brockden Brown and the Americanization of the gothic novel." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1527344.

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This thesis recontextualizes the politics of Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novels in terms of the literary development of Gothicism (Friedrich Schiller) and Romanticism (Friedrich Schlegel) in Germany. This recontextualization highlights the ways in which Brown's work is participating in a transatlantic conversation about the relation of epistemology and politics in art, while underscoring how Brown's use of the gothic addresses the vital issues of grounding democratic politics in the early republic. The argument is that between his earliest extant gothic novel and his later gothic novels Brown uses Schiller's model of the gothic tale and its appeal to methodologies of epistemological verification to support democratic politics. However, in the later novels, he disregards method and uses the state of uncertainty to articulate radical subjectivity as the basis of democratic politics—pace Schlegel's defense of democracy.

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Beal, Kimberly S. "“Sometimes Being a Bitch is All a Woman Has”: Stephen King, Gothic Stereotypes, and the Representation of Women." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1338385036.

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Dabek, Diana I. "Misinterpreted experiences : the tension between imagination and divine revelation in early 19th century Anglo American Gothic fiction." FIU Digital Commons, 2010. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2649.

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The purpose of this study was to analyze the ways in which 19th century Gothic fiction novelists Charles Brockden Brow and James Hogg explore the themes of religious enthusiasm and divine revelation. A close look at these texts reveals a common interest in the tension between the imagination and reality. By analyzing the philosophical and theological roots of these issues it becomes clear that Wieland and Confessions of a Justified Sinner mirror the anxieties of 19th century Anglo American culture. Questions regarding voice and authority, the importance of testimony, and religious seduction are common to both novels. I maintain that these authors comment on the obscure nature of human rationale by presenting readers with narrators that exhibit traits of delusion and spiritual awakening.

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Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. "The hero in time the American gothic fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville /." Access abstract and link to full text, 1989. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.library.utulsa.edu/dissertations/fullcit/8923184.

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LaFreniere, andrea Mary. "The Shaping of Consciousness: Conventional Adventure Language and Gothic Imagery in James' "Daisy Miller" and "The Portrait of a Lady"." W&M ScholarWorks, 1990. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625606.

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Norwood, Robert N. (Robert Nicholas). "Retro." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1992. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc501003/.

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"Retro" is a novel which attempts to depict the psychological reality of the spiritually isolated individual characterized in traditional gothic novels, in this case the alienated individual in the contemporary American South. The novel follows the doctrine set down by Roland Barthes, Frank Kermode, and other postmodern critics, which holds that, as Kermode puts it, "all closure is in bad faith." Therefore, rather than offering resolution to the problems and events presented in the text, the novel attempts instead to illustrate the psychological effects its main character experiences when confronted with a world that offers only irresolution and uncertainty. The novel's strategy is to depart from conventional, realistic modes of narration and to adopt instead certain characteristics of satire, surrealism, and the type of grotesque often associated with the gothic novel.

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Kielstra, Julia Paulman. "Subterranean adventures : attitudes toward the land as influenced by the sciences in selected English, Irish, and American gothic novels 1789-1911." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.389761.

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Bradford, Adam Cunliffe. "Communities of death: Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and the nineteenth-century American culture of mourning and memorializing." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/647.

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This dissertation examines the way the work of two nineteenth-century American authors, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, borrowed from, challenged, and even worked to support prevailing cultural attitudes, conventions, and ideas regarding death, mourning and memorializing as they produced their poems and tales, articulated their thoughts regarding the purpose and act of producing and reading literature, and designed their material book or magazine objects. Using both new historicist and book studies methodologies, it exposes how these writers drew upon literary, ritual, and material practices of this culture, and how, in turn, this culture provided an interpretive framework for understanding such work. In its initial three chapters, which focus largely on Edgar Allan Poe, this dissertation revisits Poe's aesthetic philosophies ("The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition"), much of his most notable Gothic work (such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"), readers' responses to this work, and his own attempts or designs to mass-produce his personal script (in "A Chapter on Autography," "Anastatic Printing," and his cover for The Stylus) in order to revise our understanding of his relationship to this culture and its literary work, exposing a more sympathetic and less subversive relationship than is usually assumed. It illumines how Poe's aesthetic philosophies were aligned with those that undergird many of the contemporary mourning objects of the day, how his otherwise Gothic and macabre literature nevertheless served rather conventional and even recuperative ends by exposing the necessity of and inviting readers to participate in culturally sanctioned acts of mourning, and how he sought to confirm the harmony between his work and more conventional "consolation" or mourning literature by actively seeking to bring that work (and the "self" that produced it) visibly before his readership in a medium that this culture held was a reliable indicator of the nature and intent of both that work and its producer - namely his own personal script. In its latter three chapters, this dissertation illuminates Whitman's own extensive use of mourning and memorial conventions in his work, disclosing the way his 1855 Leaves of Grass relied, in both its literary and physical construction, upon the conventions of mourning and memorial literature, detailing the way his 1865 book of Civil War poetry Drum-Taps sought to unite a national body politic by creating a poetic and material text capable of allowing a grieving public readership to reconnect with and successfully mourn their dead, and how his 1876 Two Rivulets, overtly conceived of as a memorial volume, made use of the conventions associated with mourning and memorializing to bring readers to a more democratic understanding of "self" that Whitman believed would transform America into the democratic utopia it was destined to become. In revealing the way in which these authors' works reflect and reflect upon this culture, its ideologies, rituals, and practices, the dissertation also illumines an otherwise critically underexplored connection between these two writers. It details the influence of Poe's work on Whitman's poetic project, and borrows from Whitman's critical response to Poe in order to recast our understanding of Poe's literature in the manner detailed above. Thus, this dissertation offers new interpretations of some of the period's most canonical literature, alters our thinking about the relationship of these authors to each other and to nineteenth-century sentimental culture, and, finally, exposes a curious interdependence between Gothic and more transcendental literature that has implications not only for reading the work of Whitman and Poe, but for interpreting these literatures more generally.

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Quinney, Charlotte Louise. "(DIS)ARTICULATING THE FRONTIER BODY: ARTIFACTS, APPENDAGES, AND SPECTRES IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE AMERICAN WEST." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1308525892.

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Williams, Eleanor. "The Divine and Miss Johanna." Ohio : Ohio University, 2006. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1145555978.

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Sonser, Anna. "Subversion, seduction, and the culture of consumption, the American gothic revisited in the work of Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Anne Rice." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0019/NQ45702.pdf.

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McCabe, Bryan Thomas. "Cars, collisions, and violence in Southern literature." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0003133.

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Colombani, Elsa. "Contes gothiques, Tim Burton : de Vincent à Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children." Thesis, Paris 10, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018PA100090.

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Le cinéma de Tim Burton se reconnaît par des codes thématiques et des images si aisément identifiables que le nom du cinéaste a donné naissance à l’adjectif « burtonien ». Que signifie au juste ce qualificatif ? Cette thèse se propose de démontrer que si la signature de Tim Burton est reconnaissable entre toutes, c’est qu’elle porte l’héritage des gothiques littéraire et cinématographique. Burton s’en empare pour les transformer, adoptant une double stratégie d’adhésion et d’inversion des tropes du genre. Afin de définir ce gothique burtonien, nous étudions dans un premier temps le croisement entre l’humain et le monstrueux, un questionnement directement hérité du Frankenstein de Mary Shelley et de son adaptation éponyme par James Whale en 1931. Nous analysons ensuite la géographie de l’espace burtonien et sa représentation d’une société cruelle et machinique dont les personnages doivent s’extraire pour survivre. L’art émerge comme un moyen de survie ambivalent qui nous mène à considérer la création artistique du cinéaste lui-même, bâtie comme les grandes œuvres gothiques sur un brouillage des frontières, entre la vie et la mort, le passé et le présent, le rêve et la réalité
The films of Tim Burton can easily be recognized by their thematic codes and identifiable images so much so that the director’s very name has given birth to the adjective “Burtonian”. But what does it qualify exactly? This dissertation proposes to demonstrate that Burton’s signature is particularly recognizable because it inherits from gothic literature and film. Burton tackles and transforms gothic tropes using a double strategy of adherence and reversal. To define what we call the “Burtonian gothic”, we first study the crossing between the humane and the monstrous, an issue directly inherited from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its film adaptation by James Whale in 1931. We analyze then the geography of the Burtonian landscape and its representation of a cruel and mechanical society from which the characters must escape to survive. Art emerges as an ambivalent means of survival which leads us to consider the artistic creation of the filmmaker himself, built like great gothic works on blurred frontiers, between life and death, past and present, dream and reality

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DeVirgilis, Megan. "BLOOD DISORDERS: A TRANSATLANTIC STUDY OF THE VAMPIRE AS AN EXPRESSION OF IDEOLOGICAL, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC TENSIONS IN LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY HISPANIC SHORT FICTION." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2018. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/532513.

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Spanish
Ph.D.
This dissertation explores vampire logic in Hispanic short fiction of the last decade of the 19th century and first three decades of the 20th century, and is thus a comparative study; not simply between Spanish and Latin American literary production, but also between Hispanic and European literary traditions. As such, this study not only draws attention to how Hispanic authors employed traditional Gothic conventions—and by extension, how Hispanic nations produced “modern” literature—but also to how these authors adapted previous models and therefore deviated from and questioned the European Gothic tradition, and accordingly, established trends and traditions of their own. This study does not pretend to be exhaustive. Even though I mention poetry, plays, and novels from the first appearance of the literary vampire in the mid-18th century through the fin de siglo and the first few decades of the 20th century, I focus on short fiction produced within and shortly thereafter the fin de siglo, as this time period saw a resurgence of the vampire figure on a global scale and the first legitimate appearance in Hispanic letters, being as it coincided with a rise in periodicals and short story production and represented developments and anxieties related to the physical and behavioral sciences, technological advances and urban development, waves of immigration and disease, and war. While Chapter 1 establishes a working theory of the vampire from a historical and materialist perspective, each of the following chapters explores a different trend in Hispanic vampire literature: Chapter 2 looks at how vampire narratives represent political and economic anxieties particular to Spain and Latin America; Chapter 3 studies newly married couples and how vampire logic leads to the death of the wife—and thus the death of the “angel of the house” ideal—therefore challenging ideas surrounding marriage, the family, and the home; lastly, Chapter 4 explores courting couples and how disruptions in the makeup of the public/private divide influenced images of female monstrosity—complex, parodic ones in the Hispanic case. One of the main conclusions this study reaches is that Hispanic authors were indeed producing Gothic images, but that these images deviated from the European Gothic vampire literary tradition and prevailing literary tendencies of the time through aesthetic and narrative experimentation and as a result of particular anxieties related to their histories, developments, and current realities. While Latin America and Spain produced few explicit, Dracula-like vampires, the vampire figures, metaphors, and allegories discussed in the chapters speak to Spain and Latin America’s political, economic, and ideological uncertainties, and as a result, their “place” within the modern global landscape. This dissertation ultimately suggests that Hispanic Gothic representations are unique because they were being produced within peripheral spaces, places considered “non-modern” because of their distinct histories of exploitation and development and their distinct cultural, religious, and racial compositions, therefore shifting perceptions of Otherness and turning the Gothic on its head. The vampire in the Hispanic context, I suggest, is a fusion of different literary currents, such as Romanticism, aesthetic movements, such as Decadence, and modes, such as the Gothic and the Fantastic, and is therefore different in many ways from its predecessors. These texts abound with complex representations that challenge the status quo, question dominant narratives, parody literary formulas, and break with tradition.
Temple University--Theses

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Olmedo, Nadina Estefania. "ECOS GÓTICOS EN LA NOVELA Y EL CINE DEL CONO SUR." UKnowledge, 2010. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_diss/86.

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Latin American literary criticism has traditionally underestimated the significance of the Gothic aesthetic, in spite of the rich Gothic literary tradition of Latin America. Specifically in the Southern Cone - the focus of my research - there is a particular recurrence and consumption of this genre, not only in literature but also in cinema, which has not been deeply analyzed. I argue that a close examination of the Gothic and Fantastic elements in these novels and films unveils anxieties, repressions and manifestations of social decay that underlie common codes of social decency and the conventions of maintaining an oppressive social tradition. My analysis of particular novels extends from the beginning of the twentieh-century through the Boom; my discussion then extends to film productions from the 1960s to the present. In the first chapter I explore the dissemination of Gothic figures and forms from their eighteenth-century origins to the present. In the second chapter I discuss how the Gothic aesthetic was used at the beginning of the twentieth-century to comment on the effects of modernization and scientific/psychological discoveries in the Southern Cone. I also analyze the Gothic as a powerful feminist discourse. Chapter three focuses on the way the Gothic aesthetic is employed as a mechanism to communicate social and moral decay in a typical Southern Cone family. I also explore how the Gothic is used to question a political-social repression or a dictatorship. In chapter four I focus on cinema in an aesthetically and technically diverse selection of filmes. All of them employ vampirism to comment on different sexual issues, such as repression, incest, homosexuality, fetishism, sadism, and other sexual-social taboos. Finally, the conclusion demonstrates that, while the Gothic aesthetic maintains certain constants throughout the twentieth-century, its underlying meaning shifts to reflect the dominant political-social themes of each era, thus ensuring its continued relevance to popular audiences.

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Good, Joseph. "The Dark Circle: Spiritualism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction." Scholar Commons, 2012. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4053.

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This dissertation offers critical and theoretical approaches for understanding depictions of Spiritualism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian fiction. Spiritualism has fascinated and repelled writers since the movement's inception in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, and continues to haunt writers even today. The conclusion of this dissertation follows Spiritualist fiction as it carries over into the Neo-Victorian genre, by discussing how themes and images of Victorian Spiritualism find "life after death" in contemporary work. Spiritualism, once confined to the realm of the arcane and academically obscure, has begun to attract critical attention as more scholars exhume the body of literature left behind by the Spiritualist movement. This new critical attention has focused on Spiritualism's important relationship with various elements of Victorian culture, particularly its close affiliation with reform movements such as Women's Rights. The changes that occurred in Spiritualist fiction reflect broader shifts in nineteenth-century culture. Over time, literary depictions of Spiritualism became increasingly detached from Spiritualism's original connection with progressive reform. This dissertation argues that a close examination of the trajectory of Spiritualist fiction mirrors broader shifts occurring in Victorian society. An analysis of Spiritualist fiction, from its inception to its final incarnation, offers a new critical perspective for understanding how themes that initially surfaced in progressive midcentury fiction later reemerged--in much different forms--in Gothic fiction of the fin-de-siécle. From this, we can observe how these late Gothic images were later recycled in Neo-Victorian adaptations. In tracing the course of literary depictions of Spiritualism, this analysis ranges from novels written by committed advocates of Spiritualism, such as Florence Marryat's The Dead Man's Message and Elizabeth Phelps's The Gates Ajar, to representations of Spiritualism written in fin-de-siécle Gothic style, including Bram Stoker's Dracula and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. My analysis also includes the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who conceived of Spiritualism as either "the birth of a new science or the revival of an old humbug." Hawthorne's ambivalence represents an important and heretofore completely overlooked aspect of Spiritualist literature. He is poised between the extremes of proselytizing Spiritualists and fin-de-siécle skeptics. Hawthorne wanted to believe in Spiritualism but remained unconvinced. As the century wore on, this brand of skepticism became increasingly common, and the decline of Spiritualism's popularity was hastened by the repudiation of the movement by its founders, the Fox Sisters, in 1888. Ultimately, despite numerous attempts both scientific and metaphysical, the Victorian frame of mind proved unable to successfully reconcile the mystical element of Spiritualism with the increasingly mechanistic materialist worldview emerging as a result of rapid scientific advances and industrialization. The decline and fall of the Spiritualist movement opened the door to the appropriation of Spiritualism as a Gothic literary trope in decadent literature. This late period of Spiritualist fiction cast a long shadow that subsequently led to multiple literary reincarnations of Spiritualism in the Gothic Neo-Victorian vein. Above all, Spiritualist literature is permeated by the theme of loss. In each of the literary epochs covered in this dissertation, Spiritualism is connected with loss or deficit of some variety. Convinced Spiritualist writers depicted Spiritualism as an improved form of consolation for the bereaved, but later writers, particularly those working after the collapse of the Spiritualist movement, perceived Spiritualism as a dangerous form of delusion that could lead to the loss of sanity and self. Fundamentally, Spiritualism was a Victorian attempt to address the existential dilemma of continuing to live in a world where joy is fleeting and the journey of life has but a single inexorable terminus. Writers like Phelps and Marryat admired Spiritualism as it promised immediate and unbroken communion with the beloved dead. The dead and the living existed together perpetually. Thus, the bereaved party had no incentive to progress through normative cycles of grief and mourning, as there was no genuine separation between the living and the dead. In the words of one of Marryat's own works of Spiritualist propaganda, there is no death.

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Sidell, Crystal. "Victorian Perspectives on the Supernatural: The Imaginary Versus the Real in Two Brontë Novels." Scholar Commons, 2008. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/495.

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The Victorians obsessed over the supernatural and this fascination with the otherworldly emerges in the literature of the day. With this thesis, I look at two nineteenth century novels that exhibit supernatural phenomena: Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). Both novels, I propose, utilize this aspect of the gothic tradition to enhance their characters' psychological realism. With Villette, I examine the supernatural as a fabricated experience. First, I study the protagonist's psyche and show how her emotional state directly contributes to the appearance of fantastic material. Specifically, I examine Lucy Snowe's childhood experiences in Bretton and then look at her continuing emotional isolation at the boarding school in Villette. I then illustrate how Lucy compensates for this loneliness by transforming the identities of her acquaintances and by often embellishing her own experiences. Following this, I examine her response to an external phenomenon, the ghostly nun. I argue that as Lucy discovers emotional fulfillment via her relationship with Paul Emanuel, she grows increasingly skeptical of the nun. This skepticism climaxes in a scene of violence, after which Lucy successfully denies the existence of the otherworldly. With Wuthering Heights, I examine the supernatural as a genuine phenomenon. To begin, I analyze two significant scenes which frame the main narrative: Lockwood's dream and Heathcliff's death. Both events, I subsequently demonstrate, are instances of supernatural interaction with the real world. Finally, I examine the spiritual and occult beliefs of the lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff. I then show how their ideology influences their decisions and, ultimately, brings about their reunion in the afterlife.

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Markodimitrakis, Michail-Chrysovalantis. "Gothic Agents Of Revolt: The Female Rebel In Pan's Labyrinth, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland And Through The Looking Glass." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1460074928.

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50

Frampton, Sara. "“I Bid My Hideous Progeny Go Forth and Prosper”: Frankenstein’s Homosocial Doubles and Twentieth Century American Literature." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/24370.

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This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

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