Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

“[B]Oth In Body And Mind”: Gothic, Affect, And Power In Eliza Parsons’S The Mysterious Warning (1796), Rayna Rosenova

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Drawing on recent enquiries into how affect theory could enhance our understanding of eighteenth-century fiction, this article offers a reading of Eliza Parsons’s Gothic novel The Mysterious Warning (1796) to examine how affective resonances in the text are used to codify relations of power. It therefore argues that the power dynamics between the characters are enacted through encounters with human agents and material objects, such as letters and haunting (dis)embodied voices. The article further suggests that affective intensities in the novel, articulated through the language of sensibility typical of mid- and late eighteenth-century writing, generate an ensuing imbalance of power, …

Nonbinary Gender Performance And Self-Identification In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Lillian R. Durr

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, a text informed by a rich Romantic era philosophical tradition, has produced an expansive contemporary body of transgender studies scholarship. Building on transgender literary studies of Frankenstein, my thesis analyzes the difference between the monster’s internalized self-perceived identity and their externally performed and perceived identity. I interpret the difference between the monster’s internal and external identity as an analogy through which to understand contemporary nonbinary experiences. The “performance” of gender that Judith Butler describes is a limited expression of an internal, inescapable, ontological experience of self-identification. The monster’s own social experience illustrates the …

Masses And The Gothic In The English Novel: 1700-1820, Szu Ying Chen

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation studies the eighteenth-century English novel and expands the understanding of realism by rereading realist novels through Gothic representations of the masses. The conventional understanding of realism is shaped by Ian Watt’s canonical concept of “formal realism” in The Rise of the Novel and Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the bourgeois public sphere. It identifies realism with a vision of civility grounded in the modern individual and bourgeois social reality. However, the masses and the Gothic challenge this conception of the novel’s realism by representing the social as constituted by collective agency, political violence, and struggles over power rather than …

Abject And Uncanny Manifestations Of Sexuality And Sexual Desire In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature, Varvara Kuznetsova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts of the abjection and the uncanny were used to depict monsters and monstrous bodies in nineteenth-century Gothic literature as a site of social, cultural, and sexual transgression. Through the intersections of queer theory, monster theory, and psychoanalytic theory, I examine and analyze depictions of women as monstrous figures in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Sheridan Joseph Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). In particular, I aim to detail how language and descriptions of women monsters become coded elements that reveal monstrosity and transgression.

The Castle Is Still Here, And Yes, It's Still Scary: Reconstructing The Gothic Through Contemporary Short Story, Alyssa Kilroy

Undergraduate Theses

Since Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto published in 1764, the literary Gothic has grown and spread to include a multitude of subgenres in a variety of formats. Gothic literature has served as both a product and a showcase of its contextual influences, providing a deeper look at humanity's deepest flaws, fears, and passions that shape our societies. While the Gothic's historically fluid identity allows Frankenstein to exist in a literary realm alongside Wuthering Heights, something consistent in its core continues to appeal to modern audiences and remains relevant in contemporary literature and other media. This project offers a …

A Review Of Ann Radcliffe's The Romance Of The Forest, Edited By Shelley King And John B. Pierce, Annette Hulbert

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The Romance of the Forest has long been one of the most teachable of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, given its relatively shorter length and popularity at the time of its publication. Now, Shelley King and John B. Pierce have prepared with great thoroughness an updated version of the text for Broadview that proves a worthy successor to Chloe Chard’s Oxford World Classics edition, published in 1986. The edition builds on Chard’s notes and includes extensive historical appendices that would benefit both teachers and scholars of Radcliffe’s work.

The Maternal Icon In Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan Of The Rhine, Esmeralda Orndorff, Joanne E. Myers

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through …

The Queer Gazes Back: A Dowry Of Blood As A Queer Mirror To Cisheterosexual Gothic Fears, Robin Bozik

English

This paper examines the connection between the contemporary Gothic A Dowry of Blood and its literary predecessors, Dracula, Frankenstein, and Carmilla. Through a focus on queer bodies, this work demonstrates the evolution of queer lineage-making and responses to cisheterosexual threats. Using literature as a “mirror” to gaze back on the visceral fears held by those who fall outside the norms of gender and sexuality in their respective time periods, this work also examines social tensions in the 21^st century surrounding reproduction and gender-affirming care.

In addition to literary analysis of the primary texts, this paper is …

Concealment And Darkness In Horace Walpole’S The Castle Of Otranto, Alexandra G. Speck

Global Tides

This paper examines the relationship between darkness and fear in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, widely recognized as the first Gothic novel. Walpole wrote Otranto soon after the rise of Enlightenment thought, which stressed sensory observation as the foundation for human reason. Walpole engages with Enlightenment ideas through Otranto’s dark setting, which invokes fear and irrationality in the heroine, Isabella.

Tracking Walpole’s manipulation of light and darkness through the narrative, this paper illustrates how darkness inspires more fear in Isabella than either the novel’s infamous supernatural dangers or its human villain, Prince Manfred, who pursues her through …

Troubling Waters: Anthropocene Marine Gothic In The 19th-Century Anglo-American Fiction, Phoenix Guqing Wang

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The 19th century witnessed intensifying marine ecological disruptions by colonial, industrial, and imperial activities. Meanwhile, current scholarship acknowledges the significance of the 19th century in tracing the emergence of the “Anthropocene” – a loose shorthand for ecological damages that are planetary in scale. This thesis aims to analyze how gothic imagination of the marine space unravels the linkages between the two temporally intersecting phenomena. Drawing on ocean studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, and gothic studies, I theorize what I call “Anthropocene marine Gothic discourse” to understand how 19th-century Anglo-American writers attend to the marine space to grapple with planetary ecological concerns …

“It’S Alive!” The Birth And Afterlife Of The Gothic Genre, Tanner Linkous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the development of the Gothic novel in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis establishes the Gothic as a literary mode of middle-class terror by analyzing Gothic novels within the historical context of the Industrial and Democratic revolutions. This requires an in-depth understanding of politics throughout both centuries and this thesis engages with several sources such as Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel which adds important context to my claims. Additionally, I use several contemporary sources such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the writings of Edmund Burke, and On the Pleasure Derived from Objects …

Succubus Matters, Jeremy Chow

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay argues that the Gothic succubus pioneers new frameworks for examining female sexuality, sexual violation, and consent in the eighteenth century. M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) reveals the Bleeding Nun as a demonic female ghost that is both sadistic and hypersexualized, especially in her tryst with Don Raymond. The spectrality of the succubus reimagines the displacement of the female body as something both material and ethereal, and in so doing, renders consequent displacements of consent, agency, and sexuality, which may characterize queer Gothic tropes. I interweave discussions of consent alongside representations and theories of ghosts throughout the eighteenth …

Haunted Heroines: An Examination Of The Complication Of The Gothic Heroine, Molly S. Callison

Honors Projects

This undergraduate research thesis is an examination of two of the most significant evolutions of the literary figure of the Gothic heroine, focusing on innovations made by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1817) and Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847). It discusses the origins of the Gothic heroine, set up by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764), and examines the ways that Austen and Brontë make their heroines more internally complex, bringing not only realism to the Gothic heroine but a psychological depth to the feminine Gothic.

The Terrors Of Everyday Life: The Gothic Novel As A Woman's Conduct Guide To Survival, 1791-1817, Jessica Berg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Gothic is often associated with the fantastical, with people and events that only take place within our darkest nightmares. In my thesis, I explore how, in the hands of Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen, the Gothic exposes the hidden dangers of reality perpetuated by conduct literature. Within conduct manuals, thousands of regulations direct women’s behaviors and identify the perfect woman as one who exists passively within the safety of the domestic sphere. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) engage in subterfuge against eighteenth-century conduct literature and expose the realities of the domestic sphere: …

Mother Monsters And Monster Mothers From Dracula To Stranger Things, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is an homage to 1970s and 1980s sci-fi and horror, including Alien and Aliens, Carrie, the Star Wars trilogy, and Poltergeist, as well as buddy adventure films like Goonies and Stand by Me. But it is also, in its obsessive presentation of monsters as mothers and mothers as monsters, a show that takes its 1980s mothering cues straight out of Bram Stoker’s 1890s. Despite its 2016 production date, the Duffer Brother’s Stranger Things presents viewers with very old fashioned ideas of mothering, with Joyce Byers (Wynona Ryder) as the single, but exceedingly pro-active mom from …

"I Want To Melt Into Her Body": Sexual Empowerment And A Feminist Recentering Of The Female Characters In Dracula By Bram Stoker, Carmilla By J. Sheridan Lefanu, And Villette By Charlotte Bronte, Carson Leigh Pender

Graduate Theses

Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, “The normal sexual act [of intercourse] effectively makes woman dependent on the male and the species. It is he–as for most animals– who has the aggressive role and she who submits to his embrace. . . coitus cannot take place without male consent, and male satisfaction is its natural end result” (385). Essentially, de Beauvoir argues that the act of sex cannot exist without the presence of man, but particularly for heterosexual women, the act of sex is dependent on the presence of, responsibility of, and response of men. However, despite the …

From Byronic To Gothic Blood Sucker: Subversion Toward A Non-Gendered Identity, Hannah Hoover

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Analyzing Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and linking trends of the Byronic hero that have merged into a variety of genres reveal that the hero is a mode of subversive gender expression, which has evolved within the Gothic through feminine desire. Delving into Bram Stoker’s Dracula will provide unique insight into the audience’s desires/expressions of gender. Finding the transition point from the monster vampire of Dracula to Stephanie Meyer’s desirous, sparkling boy-next-door in Twilight will track the trajectory of gender and sexual norms through time. From the foundational adaptation of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights to the repressed vampiric desire …

Through The Devil's Mirror: The Villain And The Sinthomosexual As Manifestations Of The Death Drive, Andrew Markus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) offers a model for reading queer sexuality and societal place very much in line with that which begins to emerge in early Gothic literature, including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796). The Gothic villain aligns with Edelman’s sinthomosexual to illustrate a pattern of victimization and retaliation which results in both the villain and sinthomosexual’s persistent abjection from the social order. However, a close reading of Lewis’s narrative for its depiction of psychological trauma rooted in sexual expression suggests that this queer negativity is not the sum total of …

Review Of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability And Sexuality In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Nowell Marshall

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Psychographic Persona Development In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Melody Day

Undergraduate Honors Theses

When interviewed about his Victorian Gothic masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde once observed that “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps” (Oscar Wilde). These three characters represent widely different types of people; in light of Wilde’s words, then, what does it truly mean to be Basil, Lord Henry, or Dorian Gray? In other words, what interests, opinions, and values held by these characters determine how each of them differ from one another? In my cross-discipline …

Shelley’S Frankenstein As A Book Of Love And Despair, Shun-Liang Chao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Influenced by Enlightenment philosophes like Rousseau and Smith, Romantic writers, such as Coleridge and Percy Shelley, celebrate the sublime power of sympathetic love to merge the self and the other (be it human or inhuman) into a wondrous whole, thereby precluding the dangers of solitude and solipsism. Not all Romantic writers, however, share the same sanguine view of love. In Frankenstein, for instance, Mary Shelley offers an alternative to the optimistic perspective on the capacity of (mutual) sympathy. She shapes the novel into tales of bitter solitude, one caused by the lack of sympathetic understanding between Victor and nature, …

A Revolution In Gothic Manners: The Rise Of Sentiment From Walpole To Radcliffe, Katherine E. Stein

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In this study, I assert that prior to the French Revolution, early eighteenth-century Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron attempt to understand the potential consequences revolution could have on British society and that both texts conclude that society can only be maintained by upholding behavioral expectations through proper manners. However, the French Revolution acted as an inflection point within the genre, and—through the analysis of the polemic texts Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman—I argue that the …

Gothic Voids: Nineteenth-Century Reader Experience And Participation, Garrett Chapman Jeter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Characterization of nineteenth-century literary Gothic is usually confined to affective response. This project argues that literary Gothic works constitute an intellectual, empirical endeavor. Because authors of literary Gothic intentionally left voids in their narratives, they invited their readers to participate in making narrative through speculation and conjecture about missing information. The practice of Gothic reading makes the reader an active partaker in filling those voids with rational conclusions. Reading is not just textual encounter. Rather, it incorporates making meaning of one’s surroundings. In their experiences, literary works’ characters “read” their environments: people, objects, events, etc. Chapter 1 characterizes Gothic reading …

Frankenstein: A Feminist Birth Myth Of Morbid Conception, Madison R. Rahner

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research

In the context of Mary Shelley’s biography and prose style, the theme and structure of Frankenstein indicate that, in addition to being an esteemed work of gothic horror, the novel is a feminist birth myth: a perverse story of maternity and a scathing critique of patriarchal dominance over the feminine. Frankenstein, as a maternal figure, repeatedly seeks to smother female sexuality and usurp heterosexual reproduction through grotesque and unnatural means. The ensuing death and violence are consequences of Frankenstein’s inadequacy as a mother and the insufficiency of masculinity. The monster’s morbid conception and subsequent murders intertwine birth and death in …

Building Middle-Earth: An Exploration Into The Uses Of Architecture In The Works Of J. R. R. Tolkien, Johanna H. Brooke

Journal of Tolkien Research

Many aspects of Tolkien's Middle-earth have been the attention of scholarly interest since the boom of 'Tolkien studies' but an area that seems to be lacking in criticism, but is certainly full of detail and character in Tolkien's books, is architecture. This essay explores how important the creation of buildings and living spaces in Middle-earth is to the underlying messages of the tale and how the architecture of Middle-earth impacts the reader's journey.

This essay starts as we the reader does - in a hole - and explores the way that architecture is used to help explain hobbits, show their …

Abjection In Late Nineteenth Century British Literature, Robin A. Imholte

Projects

In this project, I examine three major British works of literature produced in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. I show that these works reflect popular trends and fears that arose during this time, including notions of decadence and fears of degeneration. Using Julia Kristeva’s conception of abjection, as described in her work Powers of Horror, I argue that developments throughout the Victorian era: namely the advent of the theory of evolution, the …

The Complete Poems Of Anne Bannerman, Matthew Heilman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anne Bannerman (c.1780-1829) spent most of her life in Edinburgh, Scotland and published three volumes of poetry in the early nineteenth century. For my dissertation, I have prepared the first fully-annotated critical edition of Bannerman’s complete works, including Poems (1800), Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), and Poems, A New Edition (1807). A comprehensive introduction provides information on Bannerman’s life and background, and examines her work in the context of British Romanticism, the Gothic, Scottish nationalism, and the ballad tradition. Close-readings of the poems examine the ways in which Bannerman’s female narrators challenge early nineteenth-century conceptualizations of gender, particularly in …

"Your Reclamation”: The Gothic Child And Moral Restoration In Charles Dickens’S A Christmas Carol, Ashten Roberts

Master's Theses

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), an example of Victorian Gothic literature, portrays spirits escorting Ebenezer Scrooge on a journey through time in order to transform him from a miser to a benefactor. Dickens’s text has received much critical attention, and while most critics agree that the novella includes various elements of the gothic, few draw attention to the possibility of the child characters as gothic elements. I argue that Carol’s child characters can be read in terms of what Margarita Georgieva calls “the gothic child.” According to Georgieva, the gothic child can be an adult’s memory from childhood …

Narrative And The Reconfiguration Of The Humanist Subject In Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, And Ligotti, Zachary L. Acosta-Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

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 …

Cronstadt Castle [Supplemental Material], Sarah Crompton, Wendy Fall

Gothic Archive Supplemental Materials for Chapbooks

No abstract provided.