Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The City Of Nightmares: Occultism, Ecstasy, And The Literature Of Late-Victorian London, Sophie Labenski

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

While the relationship between Gothic motifs and anxieties about transgressive sexuality at the end of the 19th century is well understood, most of the scholarship written on this topic takes the idea of the supernatural for granted, or sees it as a way of establishing the links between monstrosity and sexuality. In this essay

I turn to the work of Arthur Machen in order to recontextualize the supernatural aspects of the late-Victorian Gothic literature in regard to the forms of credulity that inform the occult. While texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

A Branch Of Magic, Or The Possibility Of Myth In Esther Kinsky’S Am Fluß, Ben Pestell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article demonstrates how literary walks can evoke myth in a meaningful way for contemporary life. In particular, through a close reading of Esther Kinsky’s Am Fluß [River], I argue that the landscape experienced on foot can articulate and give access to the transcendent component of myth. I begin with a survey of how magic and transcendent experience is configured in related literary forms (namely new nature writing, the post-secular, new materialism, and the literature of re-enchantment) but remains bound by material reality. I then define the meaning and function of myth in relation to contemporary literature. These …

City As Prison: Negotiating Identity In The Urban Space In The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anita Michelle Dubroc

LSU Master's Theses

The primary goal of this thesis is to examine how the city is read in the works of four nineteenth-century authors: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860), Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), Fernán Caballero’s La Gaviota (1849), and Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807). They show the city not just as a setting, but as a character. At times, nineteenth-century urban life becomes so overwhelming to urban newcomers, that the geographical space and its society imprison residents. The nineteenth-century city was marked by change: industrialization, population shift from rural areas to urban capitals, and changes in political regime. …