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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Gothic language Writing, Gothic'
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Scott, Joline L. "Shells." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1285194565.
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Slagle, Judith Bailey. "Gothic Interactions: Italian Gothic Translations of Margaret Holford Hodson." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/3222.
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Fincher, Max. "The penetrating eye : queering gothic writing." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.411723.
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Townsend, Dale. "The orders of Gothic : Foucault, Lacan and the subject of Gothic writing, 1764-1806." Thesis, Keele University, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.403772.
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Owen, Lauren Elizabeth Sarah. "Dracula's inky shadows : the vampire Gothic of writing." Thesis, Durham University, 2017. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12317/.
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Always a story about a story, the vampire tale is forever in dialogue with the past, conscious of its own status as a rewrite. This makes the vampire a figure onto which readers and authors can project ambivalence about writing – the gothic of living with texts. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) vividly illustrates this connection. The novel presents textual interactions as both dangerous and pleasurable. What is more, Dracula has accumulated significance through criticism and adaptation. These retellings tie the novel even more closely to the processes of writing and rewriting. This thesis will begin by examining Dracula’s gothic of reading and writing. After this follows a consideration of the vampire fiction preceding Stoker’s novel, beginning with the figure of the embodied author in early nineteenth-century works like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre’ (1819), and James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampyre (1845-47). The thesis will then address the gothic of scientific and institutional language in the vampire fiction of the mid nineteenth-century, including Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872). A return to the fin de siècle follows, with a consideration of degeneracy and art vampirism outside Dracula, and discussion of works including Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907). The thesis will proceed to the twentieth century, studying the gothic interplay of film and literature in works like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). It will then trace the resemblance between Victorians and their modern adapters, suggesting that re-imaginings of Dracula, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), betray an affinity between Victorians and the ‘enlightened’ twentieth century. The thesis will conclude by examining the vampire as a figure of intertextuality, and considering the way in which postmodern vampires like those of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) acknowledge that their world is comprised of other texts. Buffy offers the possibility that the world shaped by narratives may also be rewritten, with results that can be either terrifying or liberating.
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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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Shorter, Wendy Ann. "Gothic writing : maintaining the psyche in literature and psychoanalysis." Thesis, University of Kent, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.408431.
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Vassilieva, Elena. "John Fowles and the Gothic tradition." Thesis, Kingston University, 2004. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/21820/.
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This thesis examines the elements of the Gothic tradition in John Fowles's fiction and traces the transformation of the male protagonist throughout the entire range of Fowles's novels. The work also investigates the relationship between the discourses of the literary Gothic and Jungian psychoanalysis and argues in favour of a strong conceptual link between them. Taking advantage of the fact that John Fowles was interested in Carl Jung's ideas, the thesis argues that Jungian psychology throws light on the evolution of Fowles's texts and reveals that each hero performs a phase in a distinct pattern of development and maturation as conceptualised by Jung (Fowles, 1998: 371). In addition, Jungian discourse interacts with the Gothic tradition and complements the presence of elements of the Gothic discourse in Fowles's novels. The thesis inscribes Fowles's dialectical approach to writing into the history of the literary Gothic tradition as well as into the scope of postmodern texts. Central to the thesis theoretically is the Jungian concept of individuation. Apart from the separate quests in individual novels, Fowles's fiction can be defined as displaying one continuous individuation process. The Fowlesian male character takes part in one long meta-quest which begins with his being too hedonistic and immature (Clegg, Nicholas), then becoming rational and conscious (Charles, David), and finally reaching a state of 'synthesis' in which the two parts of the psyche are reconciled (Daniel Martin). In the first two stages, the forces which become repressed as a result of the over-development of one of the sides of the psyche, tend to produce a Gothic effect in relation to the male character as they fight for the right to be accepted and recognised. In the last phase of his writing career, Fowles shifts his focus to the process of female individuation. In 'A maggot' the writer's attention finally switches from the masculine experiences and pains of development to interest in female versions of the quest for knowledge.
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Williams, Anna. "My Gothic dissertation: a podcast." Diss., University of Iowa, 2019. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/7046.
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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.
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Alsulami, Mabrouk. "Science Fiction Elements in Gothic Novels." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2016. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cauetds/47.
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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.
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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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Grimes, Hilary. "Late Victorian Gothic : mental science, the uncanny and scenes of writing." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2006. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5343/.
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Writers, mental scientists and spiritualists at the fin-de-siècle were haunted by their impossible desire to contain the inchoate elements of the supernatural within the fixity of print. By examining technologies of writing such as the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, different genres and late nineteenth-century technologies of mental science, this thesis will show that despite writers’ attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural, these tools are incomplete and the supernatural remains only a partially legible script. In addition, the thesis examines how both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind problematised agency. Is the author dictating to the typewriting machine, or is the machine the secret dictator regulating the author’s stylistic choices? Is the spirit at the séance ghostwriting the text? Issues of uncanny authorship are explored in the first chapter, in particular through a close reading of Henry James’s ‘The Private Life’ (1891). The uncanny effects of new technology on the body are also explored in James’s ‘In the Cage’ (1898), and Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ (1901). Chapter Two takes the example of Doyle and how he used the photograph as a technology to attempt to capture the supernatural. Chapter Three looks at mesmerism as a technology of the mind. Chapter Four indicates that traditional notions of Victorian womanhood, as well as writings on mental science, implied that women themselves were ghostly. Chapter Five turns to Vernon Lee, for whom the ghost story blurs literary genres, making indistinct fiction and non-fiction, ghost story and critical essay. Chapter Six returns to a discussion of the ways in which paranormal perception inspires women writers. An examination of Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) implies that New Woman writers find the altered states they access in their writing both ecstatic and agonising. A re-examination of the uncanny effects of technology through a close reading of Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) shows that in New Woman fiction, women have the freedom to engage with writing technologies like the typewriter either actively or passively.
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McRobert, Neil. "The new labyrinth : reading, writing and textuality in contemporary Gothic fiction." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.605851.
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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.
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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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Horgan, Sarah. "Writing the national self : Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anglo-Irish Gothic identities." Thesis, University of Kent, 2012. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.594274.
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This thesis announces the special relationship that Bram Stoker's masterpiece Dracula has to its creator, taking as its focal point the startling textual reflection of Stoker's own hybridised national identity as Anglo-lrish emigré in his vampire Count. Using this paired relationship between author and antagonist as its base, it thereby proposes an original reading of the novel as a work of imaginative autobiography, as a fictional rendering of the realities of Stoker's own fragmented national existence in fin-de-siècle London, positioning Dracula as a novel that deeply engages with the complexity of its author's national identity and the place of this national self in his writing. By their very nature, discussions of nationality are articulated in the interaction between the individual and the community that constitutes the nation. Stoker's own lived experiences in London provide the immediate context for the exploration of such concerns in Dracula, but these are experiences shaped by his particular status as an Anglo-Irish writer in the metropolis. Dracula is therefore first positioned in this work as the product of a historical tradition of Anglo-Irish writing long invested in the complications of national affiliation, something that Chapters One and Two explore, interrogating in the process how the legacy of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Charles Robert Maturin and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu forms the foundations of Stoker's work. Chapter Three considers in detail how it is Stoker's migrant status that serves as a keystone in this thesis' reading of Dracula by exploring the (Anglo-) Irish migrant experience in Victorian London. Chapter Four deals with the nineteenth-century literary vampire, and asks what such a motif might offer a writer like Stoker seeking to give authentic textual life to his sense of national displacement. Chapter Five reveals the centrality of ideas of writing the (national) self in external perceptions of Stoker and in Stoker's own non-fictional work. Finally, Chapter Six completes a reading of Dracula as imaginative autobiography, as a sustained literary engagement with conflicted national identity that proves illuminating of both Stoker and the class that shaped him and his most famous literary endeavour.
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Baker, Joanne Claire. "Between states : the writing of Elizabeth Bowen." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.343065.
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Van, Der Westhuizen Nadia. "Manipulation and subversion in the Gothic fairy tales of Tanith Lee." Thesis, Kingston University, 2017. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/41038/.
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Despite the great diversity of Tanith Lee's work - from science fiction short stories to epic historical novels - certain underlying themes and references consistently appear. This thesis examines Lee's applications of such themes and subtexts, arguing that her work is primarily Gothic regardless of which other genre coventions she uses. By offering a detailed assessment of her fairy tale retellings, this study demonstrates the prevalence of the themes, images and effects that have come to define the Gothic. Lee has developed several subversive narrative strategies that enable her to explore the relations between fairy tales and the Gothic, so the thesis focuses on the cultural significance of each genre's characteristic features in order to show how Lee manipulates conventions, and, in so doing, either reinforces or subverts societal norms. Lee's adaptations are assessed alongside traditional fairy tale variations and compared with a number of key Gothic texts, and the cultural and historical influence of both genres is discussed. Each chapter also briefly reviews significant developments in Gothic and fairy tale scholarship over the last few decades, which allows a more complex and nuanced understanding of the relationship between the two genres, as well as providing a context for the analysis which follows. With few exceptions scholars have ignored this author, preferring instead less genre-driven fairy tale retellings. This limited inquiry has resulted in a deficit of criticism on Tanith Lee, and the exact nature of the relationship between the fairy tale and the Gothic is still not well articulated. This thesis attempts to address that omission by examining the ways in which tale types and genre motifs are reworked in Lee's fiction, and by engaging with an under-explored intersection of folklore and popular culture.
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Ratkus, Artūras. "The adjective inflection in Gothic and early Germanic : structure and development." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609805.
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Greenaway, Jonathan. "Language of the sacred : the nineteenth-century Gothic novel and imaginative apologetics." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2017. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/619992/.
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This thesis offers imaginative apologetic readings of some of the key Gothic novels from the nineteenth century. It begins with a discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) then moves on to Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, (1824) Jane Eyre, (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847) before concluding with Dracula, (1899) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll, and Mr Hyde (1886). The thesis argues that utilising theological readings of the Gothic is both necessary and productive, bringing to the fore aspects of the Gothic text that have, thus far, been marginalised or neglected by Gothic studies. Furthermore, this combination of the Gothic with imaginative theology establishes new ways in which Gothic literature may influence the wider field of theology, by bringing Gothic literature into the work of Imaginative Apologetics. The thesis argues that the Gothic nineteenth century novel, whilst rooted in particular social and historical circumstances, possesses substantial theological content. Throughout the readings provided, theological revelation is revealed in striking new ways as the Gothic novel shows itself to be not only influenced by theology, but also theologically influential, speaking of God whilst removed from the strictures of orthodoxy and religious institutions. Taking seriously the idea that a generous God is at work in all places, the thesis argues that especially in the midst of Gothic horror, violence and the supernatural, God continues to speak and reveal Himself in strange and unexpected ways.
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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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Bennion, Anna Katharine. "It's Alive! The Gothic (Dis)Embodiment of the Logic of Networks." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2007. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2198.pdf.
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Regis, Shirley Ann. "Charles Brockden Brown's place within the gothic and the influence of early America's social issues on Brown's writing." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2007. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/3193.
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The purpose of this thesis is to show that Charles Brockden Brown was influenced by the American Revolution and the incidents that come after it. It is suggested that Brown created a gothic fiction that was intended to be a critique on the American Revolution by using murder narrratives present during the time to create his characters. Gothic fiction consists of many elements such as setting arechetypal characters, terror, emotion, psychological turmoil and language use.
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Pun-Chuen, Lia Criselda Lim. "Social Disruption in the Gothic Novels of Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Jane Austen." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2005. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1018.
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The Gothic novel plays on the exaggeration of prescribed sex roles and uses various narrative techniques to produce a social commentary on gender politics and to illustrate the consequences of a destroyed social structure. Through the examination of the construct of the Gothic narrative and its fragmentary style, the novels of Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Jane Austen reveal similar treatments of the sexuality of their characters. The implementation of key Gothic elements—such as the castle, tyrannical father, and distressed damsel—serve to propel the novels’ questioning of the patriarchal system, the theme of women as commodities, and the economic value of sexuality. In addition to creating bizarre atmospheres of suspense and mystery, the authors artfully weave the fantastic elements of the Gothic into real responses to the changing culture and sexual anxiety of eighteenth-century England.
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Garrett, Elizabeth Ann. "The Ancient Art of Smile-Making." TopSCHOLAR®, 2014. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1366.
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If I am anything, I am a Kentuckian, which means I appreciate a good storyteller. In my writing, I hope to bring back some dignity to the “lost cause” of the good values from a broken culture. While I am not quite “southern” enough to qualify as a writer of Southern Gothic fiction, I can relate to this brand of identity crisis in which someone wants to maintain an archaic mindset in a culture charging towards “progress.” As technology and corporate success take precedence over a genteel and pastoral soul, our collective competitiveness has crippled a quaint future of back porch comforts. Being well-read or holding open doors won’t pay for student loans, and there is no such thing as stars in our crowns anymore. For many regions of Kentucky, there is this conflict within the graying of small town communities. My region is one of these. As time marches on, the agrarian lifestyle itself becomes industrialized, and these old family farms, upon which small towns are built, are not self-sustaining. In my stories, I capture the perspectives of a rural community’s personalities. My Regionalism may be dated, but then so are the small town values. With these short stories, I hope to create a collection of characters whose backgrounds may be singular but whose messages are universal. My stories are about the universal fear of loneliness. Perry and White, the cameo characters, pop up throughout because they epitomize this with their irrational companionship. “The Ancient Art of Smile-Making,” “A Well Meaning Marionette,” “The Peacock Cloister,” and “In the Garden, Swallowing Pearls” are essentially about this innate need for company. “Murdered in a Good Dress” and “Myrtle Slog” illustrate the homesickness experienced by those who divorce themselves from closeness of the rural community. Sometimes we call “friendship” kitschy and cliché. And why is that? I made Perry and White’s bond a bit absurd because it is almost ridiculous that there could be a person in the wild world who would sacrifice themselves.
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Gooding, Ava E. "McCarthy's Outer Dark and Child of God as Works of Appalachian Gothic Fiction." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/79.
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In both Outer Dark and Child of God, McCarthy does a masterful job of blending the elements of Appalachian Gothic to present a novel that is darkly suspenseful and grimly thought-provoking. Outer Dark focuses on the complex incestuous relationship between a brother and sister and their interaction with others. The novel follows the two on a journey through the wilderness where they must cope with the unknown qualities of that wilderness, as well as the guilt stemming from their own behaviors. In Child of God, McCarthy explores the grotesque nature of a life lived in isolation and poverty in the mountains. This novel focuses more on an individual descent into the gruesome depths that illustrate the main character’s depravity. In these two novels McCarthy examines the darker side of life in Appalachia, and forces readers to question the purpose and meaning for the characters’ lives and actions.
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Anttonen, Ramona. "The Savage and the Gentleman : A Comparative Analysis of Two Vampire Characters in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat." Thesis, Växjö University, School of Humanities, 2000. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-535.
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<p>The creatures known as vampires have inspired authors for several hundred years. These beings are stereotypically described as belonging to a “nocturnal species” who live “in shadows” and drink “our lives in secrecy” (Auerbach 1). However, they have by now appeared so often in literary works, and in so many different shapes and sizes, that they are much too nuanced to be called ‘stereotypes.’</p><p>This essay will make a historical comparison between two fictional vampires, one hundred years apart, in order to show that a change has taken place when it comes to how vampires as fictional characters have been portrayed in terms of their appearance, their psychology, and their roles in society. The first novel chosen is, for obvious reasons, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was written at the turn of the nineteenth century by a male author and is probably the first novel that comes into mind when the word vampire is mentioned. The second novel, The Vampire Lestat, was written almost a century later, in 1986, by a female author, who, to readers of vampire fiction, is a worthy successor of Stoker. Her name is Anne Rice, best known for her debut novel Interview with the Vampire (1976).</p><p>The two novels are naturally chosen because of their similarities, but perhaps even more so because of their differences. Dracula is a typically Victorian Gothic novel, which is set in the remote mountains of Transylvania, and in the modern capital London, contemporary to when the novel was published. It is written in epistolary form but never allows for the main character, Count Dracula, to defend or explain himself and his actions in a first-person narrative.</p><p>The Vampire Lestat, on the other hand, is a Neo-Gothic novel that focus less on conventional Gothic elements, for example gloomy settings, and more on the psychological aspects of what it is like to actually be a vampire. Unlike Dracula, it is the main character’s fictional autobiography in which he recalls his life in France, his transformation into a vampire, and his current career in the United States as a famous rock star. Nina Auerbach calls it “a series of temporal regressions in which Lestat . . . embarks on a backward quest out of the knowable world” (172).</p><p>Both novels used in this analysis are thus part of the Gothic genre, one being a Victorian Gothic and the other Neo-Gothic, but there are significant differences between the two. I will investigate how these differences reveal themselves when it comes to setting and plot. However, the novels are similar in that they present two male vampires who belong to the nobility and have lived on through the centuries. The vampires both want to be where the power is, which means, in the case of Stoker’s Dracula, that he tries to conquer nineteenth-century London and seduce a young intelligent woman named Mina. Lestat, on the other hand, wants to become a famous twentieth-century rock star in the United States and simply have a good time while being a vampire (Auerbach 6).</p><p>The aim of this essay is to investigate what is typical of the genres that the two novels belong to and determine what has changed in the vampires’ physical appearance, their manners and their ability to adapt to modern society. In the first section of the essay I will give a description of the typical elements of the Gothic and the Neo-Gothic genres and then compare them in order to make a generic description of the two novels, Dracula and The Vampire Lestat. Vampire fiction will be treated as a sub-genre to the Gothic genre. In the succeeding two sections I will make comparative analyses of the two novels, particularly of the main characters, in order to describe the similarities and differences between the two and study how the vampire character has changed during the last century. Much of the discussion, especially regarding Dracula, will be based on Cesare Lombroso’s concept of the ‘criminal man,’ and various modern scholars’ opinion that the vampire is seen as an outcast and a threat to society.</p>
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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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Martin, Emanuel Henry. "Days of the Endless Corvette." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2007. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/16.
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Set in mythical Humble County, Georgia, Days of the Endless Corvette tells the story of Earl Mulvaney, a high-school dropout and auto mechanic. Earl loves Ellen, the brainy and beautiful girl next door, who unfortunately must marry Troy, the star of the high school football team. Throughout the book Earl labors on his “Endless Corvette,” a project as impossible as trying to build a perpetual motion machine. Earl has noticed that each time he takes something apart and rebuilds it, there are leftover parts. He reasons that by disassembling and reassembling his boss’s ’59 Corvette, and saving the leftover pieces each time, eventually he will have enough parts to build an entire car, leaving the original behind. The novel ends with the suggestion that perhaps Earl has succeeded at his project, which stands as a metaphor not only for Earl’s hopeless love, but other searches for answers to life’s perplexities.
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Kannan, Sitara. "Unmournable Bodies: Gothic Postcolonialism and The Spectre of Loss in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy's Sleeping on Jupiter." Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2019. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/515.
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"My thesis compares Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter in order to demonstrate how a) each text is a product of its moment and a reflection of corresponding critical thought and b) how an inversion of gothic tropes in Sleeping reflects a changed world dynamic, a melancholic exploration of epistemological and traumatic loss that can be seen not only as a recognition of the continued power of oppressive systems but a reflection on the failure of cosmopolitanism to “rescue” the global subject from her own isolation and recolonization. I claim that this is not only demonstrated by a change in form and how gothic tropes are presented, but in how homosexuality and deviant sexuality in particular is treated, a reminder that even in texts that attempt to condemn and reject colonizing tendencies, the political moment and its theoretical appendages continue to haunt postcolonial discourse, enabling recolonization and restratifying spaces of resistance. I claim that this recognition need not be totalizing or nihilistic, but that in the recognition itself lies the possibility for resistance, an act of rebellion that must be constantly re-enacted in order to deterritorialize what has been captured and displaced, a fluid and imaginative negotiation that, much like literature, is limitless in interpretation and offers readers constant and multiplicitous possibilities for agency in the face of equally fluid oppressive systems."--Provided by the author.
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Lawrence, Jennifer Thomson. "The Third Person in the Room: Servants and the Construction of Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel." unrestricted, 2008. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04172008-130053/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008.<br>Title from file title page. Malinda Snow, committee chair; Murray Brown, Tanya Caldwell, committee members. Electronic text (223 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed July 11, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-223).
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Wolmar, Gordon. "Gotiska verb på miþ- : mellan adverbialkongruens och applikativum." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för nordiska språk, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-385090.
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Applying basic linguistic theory, a grammatical analysis of Gothic verbs formed with the previously underdescribed quasi-prefix (or preverb) miþ- shows that it forms what could be called an atypical type of applicative, though in two cases it seems instead to mark verbal congruence to an adverbial. Of the possible meanings of the etymologically identical preposition miþ, the comitative seems most salient for the quasi-prefix. An introduced core argument in these constructions do not behave like a typicaltransitive object, as it cannot be passivised, and so is likely rather an extension E (or indirect object) to the core. An underlying transitive object O remains as is, and can be passivised. The construction is only used when E pertains to the topic of the discourse, either an overlapping or a new topic. It is never a background comment, as is attested with peripheral arguments. The dative case of the introduced E seems to be semantically motivated, it being thecombination—comparable to a complex case marking—of the preposition and the quasi-prefix with the dative case that signals the comitative meaning. This construction is formally unrestrained, being applied to intransitive, ambitransitive, and transitive verbs, either with or without vowel gradation. In most cases the introduced E has a human referent, but it can also be a concrete object or an abstract. It cannot be inferred from this investigation whether Gothic allowed more than one applicative construction to be applied to the same verb. It would seem there are indications that this construction might have been a relatively new and developing construction in Gothic. In the verbal template, miþ- occupies the outermost position, in itself an indication of late grammaticalization. The one extant exception to this position could indicate an uncertainty of the translator regarding as to which its proper place was. The two instances with both miþ- and a comitative adverbial suggest—unless an artifact of translation—a possible development from peripheral argument to an atypical E-introducing applicative via verbal congruence.
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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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Blakeney, Luda Katherine. "Silent Era adaptations of 19th and early 20th century Gothic novels with a special emphasis on psychological and aesthetic interpretations of the monster figure." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/23630.
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My research is centred around Silent Era films adapted from nineteenth and early twentieth century Gothic literature with a special emphasis on the figure of the monster and its translation from literary to cinematic form. The corpus I have assembled for the purposes of this analysis comprises sixty-six films made in ten different countries between 1897 and 1929. Many of these films are considered lost and I have endeavored to reconstruct them as much as possible using materials located in film archives. The Introduction lays out the ground covered in the thesis and provides a working definition of ‘monstrosity’ in this context. The first chapter deals with the historical, economic, cultural, social and technological contexts of the films under discussion. The second chapter approaches the eight literary monster figures who form the core of this thesis through the lens of Adaptation Theory. The third chapter examines the elements of cinematic language that were particularly relevant to translating monster characters and Gothic literary narratives into silent film, placing this corpus into the context of silent film history and theory. The fourth chapter reviews a cross-section of intermedial systems of classification that have been applied to monster figures, and proposes a new system that would reflect the multifarious nature of the silent film Gothic literary monster. Chapters Five through Nine offer a theoretical framework for classifying the principal characteristics of the silent film Gothic monster by applying various philosophical and aesthetic concepts. The final chapter summarises the material presented in earlier chapters and offers relevant conclusions demonstrating how these films employ the unique characteristics, conventions, and limitations of the silent film medium in their representations of the Gothic literary monster.
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Vallor, Honor Penelope. "How Gothic Influences and Eidetic Imagery in Eight Color Plates and Key Poems by William Blake Figuratively Unite Body and Soul by Dramatizing the Visionary Imagination." PDXScholar, 1992. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4659.
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A study of Gothic influences and eidetic imagery evident in eight Blake color plates to demonstrate that, when interpreted together with key Blake poems, unity of body and soul can be accomplished by means of the visionary imagination.
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Olson, Danel. "9/11 Gothic : trauma, mourning, and spectrality in novels from Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Jess Walter." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/25276.
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Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.
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Slagle, Judith Bailey. "Romantic Appropriations of History: The Legends of Joanna Baillie and Margaret Holford Hodson." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2012. http://amzn.com/1611475090.
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Introduction: The Historical Tradition of Baillie, Scott, Hodson and Southey -- William Wallace : "A Terrible Beauty" -- Exploration and conquest : Columbus, Balboa, and Pizarro -- National and Domestic Heroines : Margaret of Anjou and Lady Griseld Baillie -- Gothic Interactions : The Miscellaneous Legends of Baillie and Hodson.<br>https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1035/thumbnail.jpg
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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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Lane, Sarah Vania. "Yann Apperrys Diabolus in musica: a partial translation prefaced by an introduction to the novel and the theory of foreignization." University of British Columbia, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/78.
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Yann Apperrys third novel, Diabolus in musica, is a pastiche of diabolic and gothic tropes that tells of a musical genius who composes a ballade that kills. Resurrections, doppelgangers and triads are reoccurring themes. Although the narrator kills his doppelganger on the first page, the name of this double, Lazarus, haunts the narrative with the threat of resurrection. Similarly, the threefold tritone, the diabolus in musica, is not only echoed in the numerical structure of Apperrys novel but also in the familial triad: the fathers presence is dark and demoniac, provoking the cruel music that the son in turn forces onto the exterior world; the mother is a ghostly distillation of the Eternal Feminine. In terms of comparative readings, Diabolus can be read alongside Suskinds Perfume as the Bildungsroman of an outsider raised without love who turns astounding genius to homicidal ends. It shares narrative and structural similarities with Manns Doctor Faustus: each tells of a prodigy who composes music and a faithful sidekick who composes narrative; each arranges his novel according to number. Nabokovs influence on Apperrys work is also significant; many parallels are to be found with his third novel, The Defense.
Approaches to translation diverge according to their foundational conceptions of language: do we create language or does language create us? To conclude the former is to adopt an approach that focuses on the meanings of source texts while to conclude the latter is to focus more on their formal properties. Caught between these differing conceptions, the translator must choose between domestication and foreignization; I favour the latter for literary translation. I define the literary through a reading of the aesthetic in Dauenhauer and Kristeva, and then I review the arguments that Benjamin, Derrida, Berman and Venuti make in favour of word-based translation. From this I conclude that translation can, in refusing to hide its foreign origins, lead readers into the unknown territory of a strange language, author and text, where they become strangers, and where their language and culture become foreign. With this partial translation of Diabolus, I seek to provoke such an encounter with foreignness.
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Labourg, Alice. "Peinture et écriture : l'imaginaire pictural dans les romans gothiques d'Ann Radcliffe." Thesis, Aix-Marseille, 2013. http://www.theses.fr/2013AIXM3084.
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Cette étude se propose d’analyser les différents rapports que l’écriture radcliffienne, souvent qualifiée de « peinture de mots », entretient avec la peinture d’un point de vue thématique, structurel, symbolique et formel. Nous analyserons tout d’abord comment les romans s’inscrivent dans le contexte esthétique de l’époque et son paradigme pictural (valorisation de la peinture de paysage du XVIIe siècle, redécouverte du gothique architectural, « vision en tableau » du pittoresque). L’approche intermédiale de Liliane Louvel et sa définition du pictural au sein d’une problématique texte-image nous permettront de voir comment l’écriture file la métaphore picturale et développe ses propres stratégies pour « faire tableau » dans un désir paragonesque d’émuler la peinture. Tableaux et portraits en miniature occupent également une place importance dans l’économie du récit et leurs fonctions diégétiques et symboliques seront abordées au travers de leur spécificité intersémiotique en tant qu’objets d’art littéraires. Enfin, l’étude des descriptions paysagères au cœur de l’iconotexte montrera comment deux types de picturalité s’entrecroisent, l’une, iconique et figurative, qui cherche à « faire tableau », et l’autre, picturale et sémiotique, qui travaille le texte sur le mode plus diffus du signifiant plastique, de la dislocation du « tableau » et de la dissémination de son image au travers des substituts picturaux, de la peinture synesthésique et « iconorythmique », faisant miroiter des « éclats de picturalité » en texte. Nous montrerons ainsi comment le pictural est le mode spécifique de la gothicité radcliffienne, articulant les problématiques du « female Gothic »<br>This study will analyse the different links that Ann Radcliffe’s “word-painting”—as her writing has often been called—bears with painting, from a thematic, structural, symbolic and formal point of view. We shall first see how the novels fit into the aesthetical context of the time and its pictorial paradigm—seventeenth century landscape painting as an iconographical model, the rediscovery of Gothic architecture as a pictorial motif, the picture-like vision of the picturesque. Liliane Louvel’s intermedial approach and her definition of the “pictorial” within a text-image problematics will help us see how Radcliffe spins out her pictorial metaphor and implements her own strategies to make the reader “see pictures” in a paragon-esque desire to emulate painting. Full-sized pictures and miniature portraits also play an important role in the unfolding of the narrative. Their diegetic and symbolic functions will be studied in reference to their intersemiotic specificities as literary works of art. Finally, the study of landscape description at the core of the radcliffian iconotext will help us see how two different types of pictoriality interact, one based on figurative representation which aims at making the reader “see pictures”, and another more diffuse form which works on a semiotic level through deconstruction and iconic dissemination, expressing the pictorial signifier in words. It makes “fragments of pictoriality” shine throughout the text by means of pictorial substitutes and a synesthetic experience of “iconorythmic” pictures. We shall thus prove how the pictorial is the specific mode of Radcliffe’s Gothic writing and articulates the problematics of the female Gothic
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Beasley, Garland. "Judging the Rational and the Dead: Ann Radcliffe and Feminist Theology." VCU Scholars Compass, 2011. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/188.
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“Judging the Rational and the Dead: Ann Radcliffe and Feminist Theology” argues Radcliffe’s first three novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), and The Romance of the Forest (1791), show a progression of feminist theology informed by the late eighteenth-century British religious movement of Rational Dissent. The thesis attempts to complicate and extend Radcliffe scholarship by moving away from fractured critical discourses and into more cohesive readings of Radcliffe that include feminist and theological interpretations of her work. Of particular interest to the project are Radcliffe’s views on the circumscribed nature of women’s existence within British notions of church and state. The thesis does more than attempt to note Radcliffe’s objections to the circumscribed nature of women in British society; it also seeks to explore the potential solutions offered by a feminist theology that rejects establishment religious hierarchies in favor of a more Unitarian system.
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Evans, Jessica R. "THE MALE MENTOR FIGURE IN WOMEN'S FICTION, 1778-1801." UKnowledge, 2017. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/62.
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This dissertation follows the development of the mentor figure from Frances Burney’s Evelina published in 1778 to Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda in 1801. The mentor becomes a key figure for exploring women’s revolutionary ideas on female education and women’s roles in society. My dissertation contributes to discussions on mentoring, development of the Gothic mode, and debates over sensibility and sentimental fiction. It considers how the female mentee paradoxically both desires and criticizes her male mentor and his authority. Each author under discussion employed the mentor figure in a way that addressed their contemporary society’s issues and prejudices toward the treatment of women and the power of sensibility. Much of this treatment was traced to a conversation of reforming female education from an accomplishment-based pedagogy to a moral, intellectual-based instruction that was more masculine in nature (emphasizing a balance between sensibility and reason).
Frequently, the mentor provides general comments and recommendations about love to his female pupil, who is entering into the marriage market, but his advice often turns out to be wrong or misplaced since it does not fit the actual situation. He is a good spiritual guide but a poor romantic advisor. I assert that the mentor figure’s usual lack of romantic sentiment and his pupil’s ability to surpass him in matters of the heart reveal a tendency to subvert male authority. Throughout this discussion, questions related to gender arise. Women’s desire for their own agency and control over both their minds and bodies underpin much of women’s eighteenth-century fiction. My dissertation explores these complex relationships between male mentors and their female pupils.
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Hodgen, Jacob Michael. ""Boot Camp for the Psyche" : inoculative nonfiction and pre-memory structures as preemptive trauma mediation in fiction and film /." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2008. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2506.pdf.
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Acosta-Lewis, Zachary L. "Narrative and the Reconfiguration of the Humanist Subject in Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, and Ligotti." VCU Scholars Compass, 2016. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4223.
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This thesis examines the utility of the novels, short stories, critical writing, and generically indistinct work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Ligotti in developing a critique of the contemporary manifestations of liberal humanist social, economic, and political subjectivities. To this end, the concurrence of formal fragmentation and sublime aesthetics in early Gothic fiction models the manner in which narrative structures can appropriate structural tropes of dominant institutions, critically reflecting ideological fracture. Read according to the assemblative approach outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, these authors serve as a productive and incisive response to the hegemony of capitalist territorialization with ontologically provocative critique.
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Conrad, Courtney A. "Tracing the Origins of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Rake Character to Depictions of the Modern Monster." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1560014785115022.
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Ludtke, Laura Elizabeth. "The lightscape of literary London, 1880-1950." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:99e199bf-6a17-4635-bfbf-0f38a02c6319.
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From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.
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Bondhus, Charles Michael. "Gothic Journeys: Imperialist Discourse, the Gothic Novel, and the European Other." 2010. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/203.
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In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainlypositioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.
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Malenas, Ellen Renee. "Popular reforms : progressive ideology and gothic writing 1760-1820 /." 2007. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3282494.
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Wood, James Christopher. "Tense and aspect in Gothic : a statistical comparison of the Greek and Gothic versions of St. Mark's Gospel /." 2002.
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Lin, Chi-Hui. "Atwoodian Gothic: Trauma and Writing in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle." 2008. http://www.cetd.com.tw/ec/thesisdetail.aspx?etdun=U0001-0907200822512200.
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Cannon, Mercy. "Embodying Nature: Medicine, Law, and the Female Gothic." 2005. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/671.
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In this study, I analyze eight novels from the tumultuous decade ofthe 1790s: Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1793) and The Italian (1798); Eliza Parsons' The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan of the Rhine (1798); Regina Maria Roche's The Children of the Abbey (1796) and Clermont (1798); Eliza Fenwick's Secresy; or, the Ruin on the Rock (1796) and Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798). The novels I examine are unified not only by the decade in which they were written, but also by the discursive fields that shape their presentation of the female body. My analysis, influenced by the poststructuralist work of Michel Foucault and by feminist studies, focuses on specific cultural fields that enable me to approach the female Gothic in its rich historical dimensions.
I illustrate that eighteenth-century medicine and law exerted considerable influence over the ways in which women perceived themselves, their bodies, their choices, their virtue. Because neither medical nor legal discourse is seamless, the Gothic novelists I examine are able to respond with their own versions of female physicality as they attempt to imagine women's agency. Exposing the ideological work of such dominant discourses, the novels in this study offer representations ofthe female subject that break down binaries of mind and body, as well as reason and emotion. Since the heroines reflect an embodied self that might participate in self-determination, I focus on particular medical and legal attempts to inscribe the female body. In turn, I demonstrate that the heroines often deploy a rhetoric ofjustice that empowers their struggles to overcome physical determinism.
I argue that female Gothic novelists were intimately aware that certain popular medical ideas created barriers between them and their claims to natural and legal rights. It is my claim that as medicine studies, explains, defines, cures, and confines the body, it shapes women's relationship to the legal discourse that offers or denies them political identity. In turn, I assert that the novelists' creation ofa recognizable female protagonist indicates their attempts to imagine a subject that can maintain physical, emotional, and moral integrity in the face of injustice. In the interstices between body and emotion, public and private, justice and love, these women construct the Gothic female self.