Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Gothic Fiction'

This project begins by asking why so many realist novels of the Victorian period also exhibit tropes borrowed from the eighteenth-century gothic romance—its locales, characters, and thematics. While theorizations of realism and of the gothic are plentiful, most studies consider them to be essentially opposed, and so few attempts have been made to explain why they frequently coexist within the same work, or what each figural mode might lend to the other. This dissertation addresses this deficit by arguing that gothic hauntings interpolated into realist fictions figure socio-economic traumas, the result of uneasy, uneven historical change. Realism's disinterested, empiricist epistemology made it ideal for examining relationships between individuals and social processes, especially the marketplace and public institutions against and through which the modern subject is defined. The gothic's emphases on hidden forces and motives, therefore, became the ideal vehicle for novelists to express anxieties surrounding the operation of these social and economic processes, especially the fear that they are somehow rigged or malevolent. The gothic mode is by definition historiographical, and its haunting returns stage conflicts between the values of a despotic past and those of an ostensibly enlightened present. Realism, often understood as the investigation of social reality, also develops within its narrative a causal model of history. This is required for the sequence of events it narrates to be understandable in their proper contexts and indeed for whole meaning(s) to emerge out of the sum of disparate incidents depicted. Gothic materialist texts, therefore, are obsessed with time and its changes and especially how aspects of competing forms of bureaucracy and modes of capital and exchange determine and confront the modern subject.

This thesis explores elements of science fiction in three gothic novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It begins by explicating the important tropes of science fiction and progresses with a discussion that establishes a connection between three gothic novels and the science fiction genre. This thesis argues that the aforementioned novels express characters’ fear of technology and offer an analysis of human nature that is literarily futuristic. In this view, each of the aforementioned writers uses extreme events in their works to demonstrate that science can contribute to humanity’s understanding of itself. In these works, readers encounter characters who offer commentary on the darker side of the human experience.

This project surveys representations of the African city in contemporary Nigerian and South African narratives by focusing on how they employ Gothic techniques as a means of drawing the African urban landscape into being. The texts that comprise my objects of study are South African author Henrietta Rose-Innes's Nineveh (2011), which takes as its setting contemporary Cape Town; Lagoon (2014) by American-Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor, who sets her tale in present-day Lagos; and Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes, another South African author who locates her narrative in a near-future version of Johannesburg. I find that these fictions are bound by a shared investment in mobilising the apparatus of the Gothic genre to provide readers with a unique imagining of contemporary African urbanity. I argue that the Gothic urbanism which these texts unfold enables the ascendance of generative, anti-dualist modes of reading the contemporary African city that are simultaneously real and imagined, old and new, global and local, dark and light - modes that perform as much a discourse of the past as a dialogue on the future. The study concludes by making some reflections on the future-visions that these Gothic urban-texts elicit, imaginings that I argue engender useful reflection on the relationship between culture and environment, and thus prompt the contemporary reader to consider the global future - and, as such, situate Africa at the forefront of planetary discourse. I suggest that Nineveh, Lagoon and Zoo City produce not simply a Gothic envisioning of Africa's metropolitan centres, but also a budding Gothic aesthetic of the African Anthropocene. In contrast to the 1980's tradition of Gothic writing in Africa, these novels are opening up into the twenty-first century to reflect on the future of the African city - but also on the futures that lie beyond the urban, beyond culture, beyond the human.

Niniejsza rozprawa poświęcona jest zagadnieniu wpływu teorii kulturowych na współczesne koncepcje literatury grozy. W rezultacie, bezpośrednim przedmiotem analizy są w niej teksty krytyczne. W tekstach tych badaniom podlegają możliwe wpływy teorii kulturowych na konceptualizacje zarówno poszczególnych tekstów grozy jak i literatury gotyckiej jako takiej. Perspektywa badawcza, przyjęta w niniejszej rozprawie, jest zatem bliska perspektywie nowego historyzmu. Opiera się ona w znacznej mierze na teorii dyskursu Michela Foucaulta oraz na jego koncepcji przedmiotu jako dyskursywnego konstruktu. Z tej perspektywy, krytyka literatury grozy funkcjonuje w obrębie dyskursu, czy też sama reprezentuje dyskurs, w wyniku czego aktywnie konstruuje własny przedmiot badań. Z przyjętego w rozprawie punktu widzenia, koncepcja literatury grozy postrzegana jest jako konstrukt powstały w procesie przekształcania i dopasowywania do określonych ram dyskursywnych. Aby uwidocznić ten proces, niniejsza praca przyjmuje, iż groza charakteryzuje się nade wszystko swą ‘współczesnością’: tym, że jest niezmiennie zanurzona w swym własnych kontekście historycznych, właściwym dla danej epoki i znanym zarówno autorowi, jak i bezpośredniemu odbiorcy. Co więcej, na kontekst ten składają się nie tyle dane wydarzenia historyczne, co współczesne tekstom grozy dyskursy – społeczne, polityczne, ekonomiczne i kulturowe. Wydaje się, że tylko poprzez uwzględnienie wpływu owych dyskursów na tekst grozy i jego odbiór, tekst taki może zostać odpowiednio skontekstualizowany i opisany. Przez teorie kulturowe rozumie się tu szereg szerszych perspektyw społecznokulturowych do których od lat siedemdziesiątych dwudziestego wieku odwoływali się w swych analizach krytycy grozy. Najważniejszymi z nich wydają się psychoanaliza, Marksizm i feminizm i to im rozprawa poświęca najwięcej uwagi. Są to bowiem teorie, które wedle współczesnych przedstawień historii krytyki literatury grozy, pomogły ustanowić współczesny społeczno-kulturowy status literatury gotyckiej. Decyzja o skupieniu się na analizie tekstów krytycznych, nie literackich, jest wynikiem refleksji nad paradoksalnym, jak mogłoby się wydawać, statusem, jakim w dzisiejszych czasach cieszy się literatura grozy. Stanowi ona przedmiot rozległych badań od około półwiecza, umożliwiając badaczom wgląd zarówno w tło historycznoliterackie poszczególnych tekstów, jak i w ogólną historię współczesnej kultury zachodu. Jednakże, bardzo trudno jest odpowiedzieć choćby na tak proste pytanie, jak „Czym jest literatura gotycka?” Wydaje się, że mimo lat badań, jesteśmy coraz dalsi od udzielenia takich odpowiedzi. Fakt ten kieruje naszą uwagę na rolę krytyki literackiej w kształtowaniu postrzegania tekstu literackiego. Wydaje się, że koniecznym jest postawienie następującego pytania: dlaczego współcześni badacze grozy ukazują tą literaturę jako niedefiniowalną, wysoce zróżnicowaną i hybrydyczną, w stopniu uniemożliwiającym jej pełne uchwycenie i opisanie, pomimo całych lat owocnych badań? Niniejsza rozprawa przyjmuje jako swój punkt wyjścia założenie, że wyżej wspomniane teorie kulturowe, używane niejednokrotnie jako narzędzia analizy tekstu, dążą do odkrycia ponadczasowej prawdy, jednocześnie same będąc ‘bytami’ historycznymi. W wyniku tego, oparcie się na nich bez jednoczesnego uwzględnienia dyskursywnego tła danego tekstu prowadzi do przetworzenia i niejako ‘napisania’ owego tekstu na nowo, zgodnie z przyjętą perspektywą. Dzieje się tak, ponieważ krytyk literacki, w trakcie analizy, skupia się na tych elementach tekstu, na które wrażliwa jest dana teoria, pomijając te, których ramy dyskursywne, właściwe dla tej teorii, nie są w stanie objaśnić. Rezultatem jest przetworzenie tekstu grozy według ramy dyskursywnej współczesnej badaczowi, ale obcej dla samego tekstu. Niniejsze rozprawa, jednocześnie, sama oparta jest na teorii. Jej celem nie jest jednak odrzucenie teorii jako narzędzia badawczego. Zamiast tego, rozprawa przyjmuje stanowisko, że analiza teoretyczna musi być koniecznie poparta analizą historyczną. W ten sposób, możliwe jest uniknięcie projekcji założeń właściwych danej teorii na dany tekst. Dlatego też analizy prowadzone w trakcie rozprawy, siłą rzeczy, podparte są rozważaniami na temat dyskursów, które mogły mieć wpływ zarówno na powstanie jak i odbiór danych tekstów literackich w przeszłości. W rozprawie szczególny nacisk kładziony jest na rozważenie kwestii subwersywności literatury gotyckiej. Podczas gdy współczesna krytyka grozy ukazuje ową literaturę jako niemożliwą do pełnego zdefiniowania, mimo wszystko podkreśla subwersywność i transgresywność jako jej nieodłączne cechy charakterystyczne, czy wręcz ‘gatunkowe.’ Te, z kolei, znajdują odzwierciedlenie, z jednej strony, w założeniu niedefiniowalności literatury grozy (groza z natury podważa obowiązujące normy i przekracza granice gatunkowe), a z drugiej strony, w założeniu marginalizacji grozy (przy czym, fakt, że literatura grozy podlegała marginalizacji uznawany jest za dowód na jej ‘gatunkowe’ zaangażowanie w kontestację porządku społeczno-kulturowego, a sama marginalizacja, za przejaw ‘wyparcia’). Jak się jednak okazuje, literatura gotycka jest nie tyle niemożliwa do zdefiniowania, co założenie niedefiniowalności okazuje się funkcjonalne w obrębie współczesnego dyskursu krytycznego. Pozwala ono bowiem na dowolne definiowanie badanego zjawiska, bez ryzyka powstania ogólnie przyjętej definicji, będącej swego rodzaju ograniczającą i zinstytucjonalizowaną ‘wielką narracją,’ z punktu widzenia której możliwe byłoby automatyczne wykluczenie konkretnych koncepcji jako ‘niewłaściwych.’ Co więcej, wydaje się, że niesłuszne jest uznanie charakteru grozy za opozycyjny, czy kontestacyjny na podstawie faktu, że była ona marginalizowana w dyskursach krytycznych przeszłości. Jak pokazuje niniejsza rozprawa, ani niedefiniowalność, ani postawa anty-oświeceniowa nie są cechami charakterystycznymi literatury grozy. Pozwalają, jednakże, współczesnym badaczom na konstruowanie zjawiska literackiej grozy w taki sposób, by potwierdzało ono ich własny punkt widzenia, czy mogło posłużyć realizacji ich własnych celów. Rozdział pierwszy rozprawy poświęcony jest analizie współczesnych przedstawień historii badań nad literaturą grozy. Takie przedstawienia bardzo często powielają pewien schemat, w którym podstawą dla określenia współczesnego statusu badacza jest stanowcze odcięcie się od perspektyw wcześniejszych pokoleń badaczy, dominujących przed rokiem 1980, a przyjęcie perspektywy charakteryzującej się ugruntowaniem analizy w dostępnych teoriach kulturowych. Jak ukazują współczesne historie badań nad grozą, to zmiana, raczej niż ewolucja, leży u podstaw współczesnego statusu zarówno literatury grozy jak i jej krytyki. Nakreślenie spójnego obrazu współczesnej dziedziny badań nad literaturą grozy – dziedziny ogromnie zróżnicowanej – jest z kolei możliwe poprzez przyjęcie założenia, że badania te wskazują na subwersywny charakter zjawiska, któremu są poświęcone. Rozdział drugi poświęcony jest, z kolei, ukazaniu kontr-historii, które świadczą o dużej samoświadomości współczesnej krytyki grozy. Szereg tekstów krytycznych, przytaczanych w tym rozdziale, wskazuje na fakt, że sami badacze, zwłaszcza ci analizujący literaturę grozy z punktu widzenia nowego historyzmu, stają się coraz to bardziej świadomi procesu przetwarzania, jakiemu podlega literatura gotycka w trakcie analizy z punktu widzenia teorii w przypadku, gdy nie ma miejsca odwołanie się do kontekstu historycznego danego tekstu. Szczególnie problematyczna okazuje się być pod tym względem psychoanaliza. Dostrzegany jest również fakt, że współczesne koncepcje grozy niejednokrotnie służą poparciu kontestacyjnych postaw samych badaczy. Rozdział trzeci poświęcony jest metodologii badawczej niniejszej rozprawy. Metodologia ta opiera przede wszystkim na rozważaniach Michela Foucaulta nad dyskursem, które umożliwiają postrzegania krytyki literackiej jako swoistego dyskursu, w obrębie którego ma miejsce konstruowanie przedmiotu padań. Rozdział rozważa też przyjęte w rozprawie rozumienie ‘znaczenia’ tekstu jako ugruntowanego w tle dyskursywnym danej epoki, oraz rozważa współczesne ukazania historii badań nad grozą, oparte na odgrodzeniu się od wcześniejszych perspektyw, w świetle rozważań Stanleya Fisha nad zasadami jakie rządzą naszym postrzeganiem danej interpretacji jako właściwej. Rozdział proponuje też wytłumaczenie dla faktu, że krytyka literatury grozy wciąż zdaje się często dążyć do ‘odkrycia’ jednoznacznych prawd o swym przedmiocie badań. Rozdział czwarty omawia sposoby, w jakie sama myśl Foucaulta jest współcześnie wykorzystywana przez krytykę literacką w rozważaniach nad grozą. Z jednej strony, przytoczony zostaje przykład Roberta Milesa, który w swym studium „Gothic Writing, 1750-1820. A Genealogy” odwołuje się do genealogii Foucaulta jako wyjątkowo skutecznej metody badawczej w przypadku literatury grozy i ukazuje w jaki sposób przyjęte w niniejszej rozprawie stanowisko metodologiczne zbliża się do i różni od tego przyjętego przez Milesa. Z drugiej strony, analizie podlegają przykłady tekstów krytycznych, w których myśl Foucaulta sama ulega przetworzeniu przez pryzmat przyjętej koncepcji literatury grozy. W wyniku tego, zamiast prowadzić do ukazania nowych faktów i związków, służy potwierdzeniu wcześniej obranego stanowiska. W końcu, rozdziały piaty i szósty poświęcone są, kolejno, analizie koncepcji niedefiniowalności i marginalizacji literatury grozy. Rozdział piąty analizuje szereg tekstów krytycznych, począwszy od studium J.M.S. Tompkins z pierwszej połowy dwudziestego wieku, a kończąc na studium Anne Williams z ostatniej dekady tego samego stulecia. W wyniku analiz, okazuje się, iż nie ma zasadniczej różnicy pomiędzy wczesną a współczesną krytyką grozy, ponieważ, bez względu na przyjęta perspektywę metodologiczną, obie konstruują literaturę grozy w odniesieniu do własnych ram dyskursywnych, tym samym ograniczając swój punkt widzenia do założeń właściwych tejże ramie. Co więcej, podczas gdy współcześni badacze starają się nie dopuścić do powstania ‘wielkiej narracji,’ która zdominowałaby ich dziedzinę badań, podjęte przez nich starania mające na celu ukazanie, że groza nie ogranicza się do zjawiska marginalnego i przelotnego, przyczyniają się do rozproszenia granic tego zjawiska i umożliwiają weryfikację istniejących koncepcji literatury gotyckiej. Rozdział szósty, z kolei, ukazuje w jaki sposób marginalizacja grozy, mająca swój początek w osiemnastym wieku i negatywnej recepcji krytycznej wczesnych powieści gotyckich, uznawana jest przez współczesnych badaczy za oznakę i potwierdzenie subwersywności gatunku. Z tego punktu widzenia, literatura grozy zagraża porządkowi oświeceniowemu pod względem społecznym, moralnym i estetycznym, co czyni ja niezwykle bliską współczesnym badaczom i cenną dla badań nad formowaniem się tożsamości społeczno-kulturowej klasy średniej. Jednakże, rozdział ma na celu ukazać, że literatura grozy nie jest z założenia anty-oświeceniowa, ani nie kontestuje porządku społecznego narzuconego przez klasę średnią. Wręcz przeciwnie, wczesna powieść gotycka wpisuje się w tło dyskursywne swej epoki, odzwierciedlając zachodzące w niej przemiany społeczne, kulturowe, polityczne, a zwłaszcza ekonomiczne. Jako taka, okazuje się ona być zjawiskiem reprezentatywnym dla osiemnastowiecznej kultury brytyjskiej i często ucieleśniającym wartości klasy średniej, a nie otwarcie antagonistycznym.

This thesis argues that eighteenth-century British narratives of the nation's past and of the history of women significantly inform and shape early women's Gothic fiction. Foregrounding the idea of the Gothic as a genre preoccupied with national identity, it looks again at the coordinates of Gothic fiction to investigate novels set in Britain. It analyzes in detail novels written between 1777 and c.1802 by Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays. The study examines the uses of Gothic tropes in such texts in the light of British political crises and societal tensions, exploring how these intersect with specifically gendered concerns. Such an approach shifts the emphasis in discussions of national identity in the genre; it no longer has to be primarily seen as negotiated in relation to a foreign other. Instead, this refocusing throws light on the detail of the national historical narratives that the mode manipulates. My awareness of the multivalency of the Gothic in historico-political contexts also exposes the diversity of its use in women's fiction. The project thus aims to produce a more nuanced, historically-aware map of early women's Gothic writing.

Since the turn of the twenty first century, Gothic has emerged as one of the most popular forms in which to write for children. Although children’s literature critics and educational professionals were once dubious about the value of scary stories for children, postmillennial Gothic has begun to receive critical praise as well as mass market popularity. This thesis explores an emergent critical discourse that champions children’s Gothic alongside a variety of examples of the form. I argue that postmillennial children’s fiction employs metafictional reflexivity and explicit intertextuality, opening out into an expansive Gothic landscape. Unhoming its protagonists, readers and critics, postmillennial children’s Gothic challenges existing paradigms in both children’s literature criticism and Gothic Studies. Foremost, this fiction disrupts accounts of children’s literature that assign the form a pedagogical function, and that construct the child reader according to linear narratives of maturation offered by psychoanalysis and ego-relational psychology. In place of the ‘psychoanalytic child’, postmillennial children’s Gothic imagines a nomadic subject, constructing child protagonists and readers across a multiplicity of subject location and identities. There is not one child, but multiple figurations. The transgressive and liberating energies of Gothic play a part in this rejection of traditional figurations of the child. However, postmillennial children’s fiction also challenges critical commonplaces in Gothic Studies. The nomadic project of children’s Gothic runs counter to the melancholic figuration of subjectivity offered by a deconstructive psychoanalytic discourse that informs some analysis of Gothic literature. Unlike the tragic subjectivity of the Gothic wanderer, the nomad offers an affirmative figuration of being. The nomad is transformed through interrelationships with others, likewise transforming the locations through which it travels, suggesting new ways of reading Gothic. Taking its cue from Rosi Braidotti’s theory of nomadic subjectivity, this thesis engages productively with a variety of children’s texts published since 2000, reading them against existing criticism. I offer my analysis of these texts as part of a creative process that imagines non-unitary, non-binary figurations of subjectivity, and seeks to reformulate notions of reading and becoming.

Hideous Progeny: Postcolonial Fiction and the Gothic Tradition explores the vexed relationship between postcolonial fiction and the Anglo-European-American Gothic mode. Gothic motifs figure abundantly in postcolonial works, but they are not always meant to be taken seriously; often they take a comic and ironic stance toward the subject matter. When horror does appear in these works, it is usually not situated in the abject Other (the pharmakos figure), but in the projecting mindset of the dominant culture. As the title Hideous Progeny implies, such postcolonial novels are the rebellious offspring of the Gothic canon; they can even be dubbed Frankenstein's monsters, created from the disjecta membra of the nineteenth-century Gothic tradition and reassembled into a newly vital, global Gothic literature. Or, to use a different metaphor, they function as inverted mirror images, as photographic negatives, of the nineteenth-century Gothic novel, neutralizing its familiar tropes with an injection of "magical realist" motifs from diverse cultural traditions. This study uses a psychoanalytic methodology to analyze the Gothic source echoes in selected novels by Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie. Through the lens of post-Freudian theorists Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Julia Kristeva, in particular, these novels will be depicted as Gothic--suspended between a haunted past and a technologically disorienting present--and also anti-Gothic. If the Gothic novel explored the unconscious anxieties of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western culture, as many have suggested, the postcolonial Gothic novel explores the unconscious anxieties of an emerging global culture in the late twentieth century. Unlike its Anglo-American precursor, however, postcolonial Gothic fiction does not recoil from the unknown, but embraces the "liminal" zone, finding in it both "tiger and lady," both terror and potential renewal.

Cyberpunk fiction has been called “the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” (Jameson) This thesis aims to analyse and question this claim by rethinking cyberpunk Action, postmodernism and late capitalism in terms of three - interlocking - themes: cybernetics, the Gothic and fiction. It claims that while what has been called “postmodernism” has been preoccupied with cybernetic themes, cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic. The Gothic has always enjoyed a peculiarly intimate relation with the fictional. Baudrillard's theories, meanwhile, suggest that, in a period dominated by (cybernetic) simulation, fiction has a new cultural role. By putting “theory” into dialogue with “fiction”, the thesis examines Baudrillard's suggestion that the era of cybernetics (what he calls “third order simulacra”) “puts an end to science fiction, but also to theory, as specific genres”. The version of the Gothic the thesis presents is one stripped of many of its conventional cultural associations; it is a material (and materialist) Gothic. The machinery for re-thinking the Gothic comes from Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Deriving not from the familiar literary sources (the so-called Gothic novels of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century) but from Wilhelm Worringer’s work on “barbarian art”, Deleuze-Guattari’s version of the Gothic departs from any reference to the supernatural. The crucial theme in Worringer, Deleuze-Guattari establish, is that of nonorganic continuum. Following Deleuze-Guattari’s lead, the thesis analyses key cyberpunk texts such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and William Gibson’s Neuromancer in terms of what it calls this “hypematuralist” theme. While these texts have often been analysed in terms of “postmodernism” and “cyberpunk,” they have rarely been discussed in terms of the Gothic. Here, though, it will be shown that these texts, and important precursors, such as Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, are centrally concerned with the breakdown of the boundary between the animate and the inanimate. (A theme that cybernetics has also confronted). The thesis aims to demonstrate that, in its fixation upon catatonic trance, bodies that do not end at the skin, and agency-without-subjectivity, cyberpunk or “imploded science fiction” converges the Gothic with cybernetics on what, following Gibson, it calls the flatline. The flatline has two important senses, referring to (1) a stale of “unlife” (or “undeath”) and (2) a condition of radical immanence. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of which considers the flatline under a different aspect. Chapter 1 concerns the flatlining of cybernetics and postmodernism; Chapter 2 deals with the flatlining of the body, paying particular attention to the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud concept of the Body without Organs; Chapter 3 focuses upon the flatlining of reproduction, opposing both sexual and mechanical reproduction to Deleuze-Guattari’s idea of (Gothic) propagation; Chapter 4 considers the flatlining of fiction itself in the context of (Baudrillard’s) hyperreality.

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.

In the ideology of sentimentalism, physical sensation integrates the parts of the body into a whole, and the fragmented members of the body politic into a social community. However, intense pain is always an individual experience. It not only isolates us from other people, but is also isolates us from our own bodies: pain renders our bodies out of control. Moreover, pain attacks our very notion of self by threatening to render us unconscious, and unable to perceive that self. This complex of problems became especially acute for late eighteenth-century writers, as they tried to reconcile their sympathy for the French Revolution with the intense pain that the Revolution signified. What they articulated was a process by which the self initially identifies with the pained body of the other, but then appropriates that pain to make it one's own, thereby isolating the self from infectious Revolutionary sympathies.

This thesis addresses the central role of the haunted house in mid-to-late Victorian Gothic texts. It argues that haunting in fiction derives from distinct architectural and spatial traits that the middle-class Victorian home possessed. These design qualities both reflected and reinforced current social norms, and anxiety about the latter surfaced in Gothic texts. In this interdisciplinary study, literary analysis works alongside spatial examination, under the premise that literature is a space that can be penetrated and deciphered in the same way that buildings are texts that can be read and interpreted. This work is divided into two main sections, with the first three chapters introducing theoretical, historical and architectural notions that provide a background to the literary works to be discussed. The first chapter presents various theorists’ notions behind haunting and the convergence of spectrality and space, giving rise to the discussion of domestic haunting and its appeal. The second chapter examines the Crystal Palace as the icon of public space in Victorian times, its capacity for haunting, as well as its ability to frame the domestic both socially and historically. The third chapter focuses on the prototype of private space at the time—the middle-class home—in order to highlight the specificity of this dwelling, both as an architectural and symbolic entity. The second section also consists of three chapters, dedicated to the “dissection” of the haunted house, divided into three different areas: liminal, secret, and surrounding space. The fourth chapter examines works where marginal space, in the shape of hallways and staircases, is the site of intense haunting. A novel by Richard Marsh and stories by Bulwer-Lytton, Algernon Blackwood and W.W. Jacobs are analyzed here. The fifth chapter is a journey through rooms and secretive space of the spectral home; works by authors such as Wilkie Collins, J.H. Riddell and Sheridan Le Fanu are considered in order to argue that the home’s exceptional compartmentalization and its concern for secrecy translated effortlessly into Gothic fiction. The final chapter addresses an integral yet external part of the Victorian home—the grounds. Gardens in works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, M.R. James, and Oscar Wilde are inspected, proving Gothic fiction’s disregard for boundaries and its ability to exceed the parameters of the home.

This thesis seeks to explore the subject of communication in gothic fiction, identifying this as a key theme in terms of anxiety as explored in this genre of fiction. Communication is related specifically here to the concept of monstrosity, and representations of monstrous figures within the genre of gothic fiction. The study is made through three key areas, the first focusing on language and communication, the second on the concept of the other and how alterity relates to communication, and the third examining the question of community as a key aspect within the theme of communication in gothic narratives. A wide range of texts is taken for discussion, historically speaking, from the earliest, Dacre's 1806 novel ZoJloya, through to the 2002 film 28 Days Later. Literary texts, films and television are included here for the different aspects they bring to the debate.

The purpose of this research is to investigate Thomas Hardy’s relation to the Gothic tradition, especially that deriving from the classic period 1760-mid-1820s. The main novels chosen for such an investigation are Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Parallels with the following texts form the heart of the thesis: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin, Caleb Williams, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. This investigation has been instigated by three major elements noted in the criticism on Hardy’s literary art in general and on his tragedies in particular. First, although Hardy scholars employ terminology pertaining to the Gothic and romance genres in describing Hardy’s plots, characters and settings, very few of them make a direct and explicit connection to the Gothic novel. Second, the few who do broach the Gothic elements in Hardy’s fiction limit their understanding of the kind of Gothic Hardy employs mainly to the second quarter of the nineteenth century and onwards. Moreover, they seem to be more willing to admit such influence in his minor works, obfuscating the influence of Gothic discourse on his major novels. Therefore, this research will attempt to investigate Hardy’s involvement with Gothic discourse and examine the ways in which the characteristic settings, drama and character-types of such discourse are domesticated, complicated and made more subtle in Hardy’s work. Finally, it envisages further investigation into Hardy’s work in its relation to his architectural knowledge and his philosophic views of life in general, and his views of humanity’s place in it in particular.

In February 1997, the concept of the clone, previously confined to the pages of fiction, became reality when Dolly the sheep was introduced to the world. The response to this was unprecedented, initiating a discourse on cloning that permeated a range of cultural forms, including literature, film and television. My thesis examines and evaluates this discourse through analysis of contemporary fiction, including Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), Stefan Brijs's The Angel Maker (2008), Duncan Jones's Moon (2009), and BBC America's current television series Orphan Black, which first aired in 2013. Such texts are placed in their cultural and historical setting, drawing comparisons between pre- and post-Dolly texts. The thesis traces the progression of the clone from an inhuman science fiction monster, to more of a tragic "human" creature. The clone has, however, retained its fictional portrayal as "other," be that double, copy or manufactured being, and the thesis argues that the clone is a Gothic trope for our times. The roots of the cloning discourse often lie in Gothic narratives, particularly Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which is analysed as a canonical cloning text. Each chapter focuses on a source of fascination and fear within the cloning discourse: the influence of Gothic paternity on the figure of scientist; the notion of the clone as manufactured product, victim and monster; and the ethical and social implications of cloning. There is a dearth of critical analysis on the contemporary literary clone, with the most comprehensive study to date neither acknowledging the alignment of cloning and the Gothic nor demonstrating the impact of Dolly on fictional portrayals. My thesis addresses this, interweaving fiction, science and culture to present a monster which simultaneously embodies difference and sameness: a new monster for the twenty-first century.

This thesis examines the potential of reimagining the Gothic to produce more complex representations of biological sisters when writing fiction. Through writing the novel, 'The Marble Platform', this project reveals how Gothic tropes of the double, transgression, and haunting can be adapted to facilitate subversive behaviour between fictional sisters. Recognising this subversive behaviour is crucial for expanding understandings of sisters in literary narratives, and for providing creative writers with a new approach for engaging with the Gothic tradition.

Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate. The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth-century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers.

This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach. Gothic fiction explores the threats which profoundly challenge narrative subjects, and so may be described as concerned with epistemological, ideological and ontological boundaries. In the interactive fictions these boundaries are explored dually through the player’s traversal (that is, progress through a work) and the narrative(s) produced as a result of that traversal. The first three works in this study explore the vulnerabilities related to conceptions of human subjectivity. As an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” Nevermore, examined in chapter one, is a work in which self-reflexivity extends to the remediated use of the Gothic conventions of ‘the unspeakable’ and ‘live burial’ which function in Poe’s poem. In chapter two, postmodern indeterminacy, especially with regard to the tensions between spaces and subjective boundaries, is apparent in the means through which the trope of the labyrinth is redesigned in Anchorhead, a work loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s terror fiction. In the fragmented narratives produced via traversal of Madam Spider’s Web, considered in chapter three, the player character’s self-fragmentation, indicated by the poetics of the uncanny as well as of the Gothic-grotesque, illustrates a destabilized conception of the human subject which reveals a hidden monster within, both for the player character and the player. Finally, traversal of Slouching Towards Bedlam, analyzed in chapter four, produces a series of narratives which function in a postmodern, recursive fashion to implicate the player in the viral infection which threatens the decidedly posthuman player character. This viral entity is metaphorically linked to Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula. As it is the only work in the study to present a conception of posthuman subjectivity, Slouching Towards Bedlam more specifically aligns with the subgenre ‘cybergothic,’ and provides an illuminating contrast to the other three interactive fictions. In the order in which I examine them, these works exemplify a postmodern development of the Gothic which increasingly marries fictional indeterminacy to explicit formal effects, both during interaction and in the narratives produced.

This thesis is a study of the Gothic fiction of Sabine Baring-Gould (1834- 1924), with particular attention given to Baring-Gould’s roles as squire and parson. I have chosen to analyze two of Baring-Gould’s Gothic works, the novel Mehalah (1880) and the novella Margery of Quether (1884), both which allow a particularly profitable examination of the influence of Baring-Gould’s roles on his fiction. In studying these texts I apply my theory of Gothic fiction as a particularly modern genre built upon a "Gothic threshold," a meeting point of extreme opposites which ambivalently contrasts and merges the categories of the modern and the medieval. In the first chapter I describe how Baring-Gould’s unique Hegelian-influenced Tractarian philosophy influenced his creation of the dialectical setting of Mehalah. I argue that because of this influence Mehalah should be recognized as a significant contribution to the literature of the Oxford Movement. In the second chapter I argue that Mehalah’s historical setting in the time of the French Revolution and the influence of Wuthering Heights reinforce Mehalah’s use of the “Gothic threshold” structure and contribute to its theme of ambivalent progress. In the third chapter I discuss the influence of Baring-Gould’s sermon-writing on Mehalah and consider connections between Baring-Gould’s role as parson and the novel’s botched marriage theme. In the final chapter I discuss Margery of Quether as an innovation in the Gothic and vampire tradition as perhaps the only Gothic work that directly dramatizes the Land Law debate and presents that debate as a "Gothic" contest. I argue that Margery channels Baring-Gould’s tensions as a landowner. In the conclusion I argue that Mehalah and Margery display Baring-Gould’s technique of constructing miniature Gothic battles that relate to larger confrontations, and that the ultimate terror presented in these works is the conclusion of the battle between ancient and modern forces.

This thesis is concerned with the importance of the gaze in fin-de-siecle Gothic. One of the ways in which the importance of the gaze manifests itself is in the central role of the onlooker like Enfield, Utterson or Lanyon in Robert Louis Stevenson's Stange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Prendick In H.G. Well's Island of Dr Moreau (1896), or Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). As their appelation suggests, Wells's Beast Men confound the distinction between the human and the animal, which is also the case with 'Beast Men' like Hyde and Dracula. A central concern of the thisis is the perceptual drama that is involved in looking at the spectacle of the monstrous body, for excample, as the onlooker struggles to get to grips with the challenge to representation posed by these 'Beast Men'.

This thesis scrutinises the complex ‘afterlife’ of sensation fiction in the wake of the 1860s and ‘70s, after the end of the period that critics have tended to view as the heyday of literary sensationalism. It identifies and explores the consistent framing of sensation fiction as a pathological ‘style of writing’ by middle-class critics in the periodical press, revealing how such responses were moulded by new and emerging medical research into the nervous system, the cellular structure of the body, and the role played by germs in the transmission of diseases. Envisioned as a disease characterised by its new immersive and affective reading process, sensation fiction was believed to be infecting its readers. It infiltrated their nervous systems, instigating a process of metamorphosis that gradually depleted their physical and mental integrity and reduced them to a weakened, ‘flabby’, ‘limp’ state. The physical boundaries of the body, however, were not the only limits that sensation fiction seemed to wilfully disregard. ‘[S]preading in all directions’, it contaminated other modes, other media, and other kinds of recreational entertainment, making them equally sensational and pathological. One of these modes was Gothic monster fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, which was repeatedly labelled ‘sensational’ and described as generating the same cardiovascular responses as works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry Wood. This infection of fin de siècle Gothic fiction by literary sensationalism can be gauged in the plots and monsters that those texts portray. Gothic monster narratives at the end of the nineteenth century are shaped by the concerns at the heart of middle-class commentators’ responses to sensation fiction, and by the medical lexicon employed to vocalise these anxieties. Monstrosity is linked to contagion and stimulation, as the monster seems to pollute all those with whom it comes into contact. It triggers a process of degeneration and debilitation akin to that associated with the reading of sensation fiction, producing a host of ‘shocked’, nervous, or hysterical characters. Encounters with the monster are linked to recreational reading or other kinds of behaviour that such reading became associated with, such as thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and illicit sexual desire. The result is a group of texts in which the monster embodies the same threat to boundaries, as well as individual, and, at times, national health that middle-class reviewers associated with literary sensationalism.

This paper combines concepts from Romantic and Gothic literature with ecocriticism in order to discuss eco-zombies in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as the film, 28 Days Later and the texts that follow the film: the graphic novel, 28 Days Later: The Aftermath by Steve Niles, and the comic books series, 28 Days Later, by Michael Alan Nelson. Throughout this paper, nature, primarily through the eco-zombie interpretation of it, is read as a character in order to determine how much agency nature has over the human characters within the texts and film being discussed. The use Todorov’s narrative theory, in this paper, depicts the plots of these stories, specifically the changes to the lives of these characters and how they are affected by nature in various ways, to depict nature’s ever growing assertiveness over the humans that encounter it as well as how those humans attempt to overcome the disruptions that nature places on their sense of self. Both Frankenstein’s monster and the infected in 28 Days Later, when seen as eco-zombies, and therefore granting agency to nature, exert power of humans through physically affecting them as well as mentally.

This thesis represents the spiritual connection between a non-Aboriginal Australian and the Australian natural landscape through a creative work, Heartwood, and an exegesis, which engages with the white-vanishing trope in Australian Gothic fiction. It critically examines ways in which this trope has been used in Australian literature to, consciously or not, represent Aboriginal characters as Other, peripheral or absent, and sometimes appropriated their religious beliefs. Heartwood (2021) is an Australian Gothic novel which features two white Australian characters and their spiritual connection to the landscape, in an attempt to articulate the white-vanishing trope but without othering or sidelining Aboriginal characters. The novel also attempts to explore a form of spiritual connection which does not impinge on or appropriate Aboriginal religious beliefs, a thematic concept rarely explored in Australian Gothic fiction. This thesis utilised the Practice Based Research methodological approach in an attempt to gain new knowledge through the research and creative production of a novel, Heartwood. The subsequent exegesis explores how effective this creative work has been in seeking out this new knowledge. Since the emergence of Australian forms of Gothic fiction during colonisation, white Australian writers have explored the complex and fraught spiritual relationship between non-Aboriginal people and the landscape, often utilising corrosive narrative structures such as the lost-in-the-bush trope to do so. In these texts Aboriginal presence is sidelined or even completely ignored in favour of a primarily white Australian focus. When Aboriginal characters do appear, they have been depicted as demonic, ghostly or supernatural. Some academics believe because Aboriginal characters are depicted as inhuman, their connection to the landscape and sense of land ownership has been elided. Aboriginal religious beliefs have also been appropriated in these works to explore a non- Aboriginal sense of spirituality. Some of the most popular and critically acclaimed Australian novels of the twentieth century have been guilty of this, such as Voss by Patrick White and Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. This creative work, and the exegesis accompanying it, explore and ultimately seek to subvert the bias inherent in these traditions of Australian Gothic fiction. This is achieved by producing a story which refuses to appropriate Aboriginal religious and/or spiritual beliefs, as well as featuring Aboriginal characters who are not depicted as supernatural or ghostly. The novel also explores a spiritual connection between non-Aboriginal characters and the natural landscape of Western Australia’s Southern Forests region without impinging on the religious beliefs of Aboriginal people. The creative work re-emplaces Aboriginal presence into the text without appropriating an Aboriginal voice or point-of-view.

In My Gothic Dissertation, I perform an intertextual analysis of Gothic fiction and modern-day graduate education in the humanities. First, looking particularly at the Female Gothic, I argue that the genre contains overlooked educational themes. I read the student-teacher relationships in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831), and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as critiques of the insidious relationship between knowledge and power. Part literary critic and part literary journalist, I weave through these readings reports of real-life ‘horror stories’ of graduate school, arguing that the power imbalance between Ph.D. advisors and their students can be unexpectedly ‘Gothic’ as well. Drawing on research from the science of learning—developmental psychology, sociology, and pedagogical theory—I advocate for more a student-centered pedagogy in humanities Ph.D. training. Following in the footsteps of A.D. Carson and Nick Sousanis, I have produced My Gothic Dissertation in a nontraditional format—the podcast. Mixing voice, music, and sound, I dramatize scenes from the novels and incorporate analysis through my narration. The real-life “Grad School Gothic” stories are drawn from personal interviews. Much of the science of learning is drawn from personal interviews with researchers as well, though some material comes from recorded presentations that have been posted to public, online venues such as YouTube. The creative/journalistic style of reporting is heavily influenced by programs such as This American Life, Invisibilia, and Serial, with the dual aims of engaging a broad audience and expanding our modes of scholarly communication beyond the page.

Edgar Allan Poe is everywhere. His influence resonates not only in American literary criticism, but in popular culture where Homer and Bart Simpson act out "The Raven" in an episode of The Simpsons and Poe can be seen getting into a rap battle with Stephen King on the popular YouTube video series Epic Rap Battles. While a great deal has been written about the significance of Poe's oeuvre, few scholars have focused primarily on the grotesque in his short fiction. This thesis will explore Edgar Allan Poe's aesthetic influences, his place within the gothic tradition and describe the three elements that create his specific grotesque aesthetic: the affective reader, obsessive design, and haptic space. This thesis will describe how these elements whether in the unnamed narrator's bridal suite in "Ligeia" or the protagonist of "The Pit and the Pendulum" experiencing the apparatus of torture during the Spanish Inquisition, create a sense of indeterminacy, trapped between pain and pleasure, beauty and terror, life and death. Analyzing Poe's texts this thesis will describe these grotesque figurations and what these constructions mean narratively and artistically and how they inform the author's larger intellectual goals.

The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern British Female Gothic fiction in terms of its abject representations of female desire which subvert the patriarchal definition of female sexuality as repressed and female identity as the object of desire. The study analyzes texts from postmodern Female Gothic fiction which are feminist rewritings of the traditional Gothic narratives. The conventional Gothic plot is based on the Oedipal development of identity which excludes the (m)other and deprives the female from autonomous subjectivity. The feminist rewritings of the conventional Gothic plot have a subversive aim to recast the Oedipal identity formation and they embrace the (m)other figure in order to blur the strict boundaries between the subject and the object. Besides, these rewritings aim to destroy the image of the victimized heroine within the imprisoning conventional Gothic structures and transgress the cultural, social and sexual definitions of women constructed by patriarchal sexual politics. The study bases its analyses on Jean Rhys&rsquo
s Wide Sargasso Sea, Angela Carter&rsquo
s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Emma Donoghue&rsquo
s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins as examples in which patriarchal definition of the female desire as passive is destroyed and the female desire as active is promoted by the adoption of abject representations, which challenge the strictly constructed hierarchical relationships between men and women. Basing its argument on Julia Kristeva&rsquo
s psychoanalytical theories, which re-vision the traditional psychoanalytical theories, this study puts forward that by the emergence of postmodernism, which has overtly provided a ground for the marginalized discourses to get into dialogue with the oppressive ones, the abject representations of female desire have gained a positive characteristic that can liberate female body from the control and authority of the male-dominated ideology. Thus, one can chronologically follow the positive development of abject representations of female sexuality in Rhys&rsquo
s, Carter&rsquo
s and Donoghue&rsquo
s works which promote a liberation for the Gothic heroines from patriarchal psychoanalytical identity development, which render female desire active and female body expressive, which rehistoricize female sexuality from a feminist lens and which call for a new world order built upon an egalitarian basis that destroys hierarchically constructed gender roles. As a result, postmodern British Female Gothic Fiction is proved to be offering a utopian ideal of an egalitarian society, but although utopian and radical, not an impossible one to be realized.

This thesis examines the forms and functions of self-consciousness in contemporary Gothic fiction. Though self-consciousness is an often-mentioned characteristic of Gothic writing, it has yet to be explored in sufficient depth. In particular, critics have failed to recognise the manner in which the myriad forms of textual and generic self-reflexivity at work contribute to the fiction’s fearful agenda: how self-consciousness in the Gothic is itself Gothicised. This thesis argues that, rather than being an ancillary quirk of generic coherence or an indication of creative exhaustion, self-consciousness has become an integral part of the genre’s terroristic project, a new source and representational mode of terror. In the wake of postmodern and post-structural theory, the genre’s longstanding interest in reading, writing and textuality has been renewed, re-contextualised and redeployed as a key feature of the Gothic ‘effect’. My original contribution to knowledge is a charting of the intersections between the Gothic and this critical perspective on the text. In particular I explore how the Barthesian reorientation of the text is redeployed in Gothic fiction as a source of terror. Rather than pursuing an author-centric division of chapters I have organised the thesis around types of self-conscious commentary that occur throughout the contemporary Gothic. These are: a focus on the process of writing and textual composition; the internalisation and Gothicised representation of critical theory; an acute awareness and meta-commentary on the critical and commercial contexts of Gothic; and intertextuality. Key texts include Stephen King’s Misery (1987), Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted (2005), A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005), R. M. Berry’s Frank (2005) and Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008). This selection of texts is representative of a varied but coherent inward turn in the Gothic fiction of recent decades. It is, however, by no means exhaustive and supplementary evidence will be provided from additional texts. Equally, it is important to contextualise this contemporary turn in relation to an established vein of self-consciousness in the Gothic, present since its inception. As such, my approach is firstly to trace a lineage of reflexivity and to draw upon that tradition in demonstrating how contemporary Gothic writers have honed this technique to a uniquely terrifying purpose.

This thesis explores the conventions of both historical and Gothic fiction in order to investigate what seems to be a recurrent impulse to exorcise the past in what I define as contemporary Neo-Gothic fiction. It therefore attempts to establish a distinction between Neo-Gothic fiction and other forms of contemporary Gothic fiction by focusing on the treatment of history, the supernatural and the grand narrative of progress in three contemporary Gothic novels: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates. This thesis argues that the most potent manifestation of history can be found in the representation of the revenant in Neo-Gothic fiction, which exhibits a disruptive and evil ontology that problematises the exorcism of the past. Furthermore, the reactions of ‘modern’ characters to these revenants illustrate the imperative to exorcise the past, and therefore the treatment of history and the past is reflected in the interaction between the ‘modern’ characters and the Gothic revenants. Through this interaction as well as the parody of traditional Gothic and historical fiction conventions, Neo-Gothic fiction constructs a critique of the Enlightenment’s grand narrative of progress. Paradoxically, this constitutes Neo-Gothic fiction’s own attempt to exorcise the past, which it recognises in a simplified and reductive narrative of history propounded through the grand narrative of progress. This thesis therefore pays particular attention to the configuration of revenants as evil and ‘modern’ humans as good, and the disruption of this simple binary that is effected through Neo-Gothic fiction’s subversion of the grand narrative of progress. This focus allows for the theorisation of the revenant through Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘hauntology’ and Julia Kristeva’s ‘the abject’, the investigation of the treatment of history in Neo-Gothic fiction and the exploration of very recent Gothic texts that have not yet received much critical attention.

Australia is a land without haunted castles or subterranean corridors, without ancient graveyards or decaying monasteries, a land whose climate is rarely gloomy. Yet, the literary landscape is splattered with shades of the Gothic genre. This Gothic heritage is especially evident within elements of nineteenth century Australian sensation fiction. Australian crime fiction in the twentieth century, in keeping with this lineage, repeatedly employs elements of the Gothic, adapting and appropriating these conventions for literary effect. I believe that a ‘mélange’ of historical Gothic crime traditions could produce an exciting new mode of Gothic crime writing in the Australian context. As such, I have written a contemporary literary experiment in a Gothic crime ‘hybrid’ style: this novella forms my creative practice. The accompanying exegesis is a critical study of a selection of Australian literary works that exhibit the characteristics of both Gothic and crime genres. Through an analysis of these creative works, this study argues that the interlacing of Gothic traditions with crime writing conventions has been a noteworthy practice in Australian fiction during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and these literary tropes are interwoven in the writing of ‘The Candidate’, a Gothic crime novella.

This thesis examines representations of undeath in relation to political power over life in a selection of contemporary British novels published between 1990 and 2010. The novels I focus on draw significantly on themes and imagery from the Gothic genre in order to reflect on the ways in which political, legal and social institutions both produce and depend on certain constructions of human life; on the one hand, the construction of life that is considered worthy of being supported and preserved; and, on the other hand, the construction of life that is judged to be a threat to the health of a population, and is thus abandoned to the experience of legal or social ‘undeath’. Although this thesis begins by situating this form of undeath in relation to Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics, it draws primarily on subsequent philosophical reflections on the intersection of politics and life in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida. All of these thinkers pose crucial questions concerning the relationship between life and politics, law, and sovereignty, as well as interrogating divisions between life and technology and between human and animal life which prove critical in decisions on which lives will be fostered and which lives abandoned. I argue that the Gothic genre constitutes a key resource for contemporary British writers whose work displays an insistent concern with the relationship between political power and biological life; moreover, I also argue that the novels in question often point to moments where theories of ‘bare life’ and of biopolitics in their current forms sometimes struggle to fully account for diverse experiences of being undead before political power over life in the contemporary period.

This dissertation examines the issues of food, voice and hospitality in nineteenthcentury Gothic fiction, from Frankenstein to Dracula. Together with these two Gothic texts the study analyses three other novels, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire, and one short story by E. A. Poe, 'Bon-Bon'. The study looks at the representation of bodies, the monstrous and the normal, and at what happens when bodies are engaged with eating and speaking, with things that happen at the edge of the mouth. From such a bodily threshold the study then moves into a discussion of hospitality, at the level of macro and microspaces, from public to private places, all involving transactions of food and voice. This dissertation explores the complex interactions between food, voice and hospitality, and makes explicit connections between the theoretical dimension of hospitality and its material and bodily practices. Although orality has undergone substantial metamorphosis and extraordinary prosthetic evolution, it still continues to happen at the edge of the mouth. The alimentary function of the mouth is distinguishable from the linguistic function but both engage with a separation between inside and outside. This threshold has a literal and figurative value which is expressed in the Gothic. Whether literature of 'terror' or of 'excess', the Gothic is a body-centred mode. Gothic literature deals with the physical body, the corporeal whose acts of eating and voicing are regulated by social and cultural norms. The nearest element to a socially regu lated access, a kind of prosthetics of the body, is given by hospitality. Hospitality represents the moment in which what is taken for granted is put into discussion. The dissertation considers the 'appetite' for the Gothic text; how the Gothic deals with the discourse of food; the border between normal and monstrous appropriation of food, voice and space; embodied and dis-embodied voices; the voice as a means for the negotiation of social and cultural practice; the tension between speech and writing.

Using trauma theory, I analyze the disjointed narrative structure of gothic works from 1764-1853 as symptomatic of the traumatic experience. Gothic novels contain multiple structural anomalies, including gaps in experience that indicate psychological wounding, use of the supernatural to violate rational thought, and the inability of witnesses to testify to the traumatic event. These structural abnormalities are the result of trauma that characters within these texts then seek to prevent or repair via detection.

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.