Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Gothic literature'
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Andrews, Elizabeth. "Devouring the Gothic : food and the Gothic body." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/375.
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At the beginnings of the Gothic, in the eighteenth century, there was an anxiety or taboo surrounding consumption and appetite for the Gothic text itself and for the excessive and sensational themes that the Gothic discussed. The female body, becoming a commodity in society, was objectified within the texts and consumed by the villain (both metaphorically and literally) who represented the perils of gluttony and indulgence and the horrors of cannibalistic desire. The female was the object of consumption and thus was denied appetite and was depicted as starved and starving. This also communicated the taboo of female appetite, a taboo that persists and changes within the Gothic as the female assumes the status of subject and the power to devour; she moves from being ethereal to bestial in the nineteenth century. With her renewed hunger, she becomes the consumer, devouring the villain who would eat her alive. The two sections of this study discuss the extremes of appetite and the extremes of bodily representations: starvation and cannibalism.
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Davison, Carol Margaret. "Gothic Cabala : the anti-semitic spectropoetics of British Gothic literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34941.
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The figure of the Wandering Jew in British Gothic literature has been generally regarded as a static and romantic Everyman who signifies religious punishment, remorse, and alienation. In that it fails to consider the fact that the legend of the Wandering Jew signalled a noteworthy historical shift from theological to racial anti-Semitism, this reading has overlooked the significance of this figure's specific ethno-religious aspect and its relation to the figure of the vampire. It has hindered, consequently, the recognition of the Wandering Jew's relevance to the "Jewish Question," a vital issue in the construction of British national identity. In this dissertation, I chronicle the "spectropoetics" of Gothic literature---how the spectres, of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt the British Gothic novel. I trace this "spectropoetics" through medieval anti-Semitism, and consider its significance in addressing anxieties about the Crypto-Jew and the Cabala's role in secret societies during two major historic events concurrent with the period of classic Gothic literature---the Spanish Inquisition, a narrative element featured in many Gothic works, and the French Revolution, a cataclysmic event to which many Gothic works responded. In the light of this complex of concerns, I examine the role of the Wandering Jew in five Gothic works---Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk (1795), William Godwin's St. Leon (1799), Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872), and Brain Stoker's Dracula (1897). In my conclusion, I delineate the vampiric Wandering Jew's "eternal" role in addressing nationalist concerns by examining his symbolic preeminence in Nazi Germany.
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Smith, Sarah Nicole. "Group representations in Gothic literature /." Available to subscribers only, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1136093421&sid=6&Fmt=2&clientId=1509&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Heinemann, Chloe Janelle. "Women's Agency in Gothic Literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/595049.
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The objective of this thesis is to argue for and analyze the progression of women's agency in the first century of Gothic literature. Starting with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), there are stirrings of women's agency as female protagonists begin to challenge male authority and attempt to escape the entrapment of the patriarchal hierarchy. As we move from Otranto to Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), we can see the progression of women's agency as the heroine acquires social, financial, and romantic control through her strong moral disposition. Finally, a new level of agency appears in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), as the protagonist stands up to male authority and openly declares the idea that women should be treated equally with men. Women's agency continues to evolve in Gothic works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) and the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), even if some limitations are still present. These works grant women more independent agency than ever before, but they also suggest that there are still constraints, even in the twenty-first century.
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Garcia, de Leon Olga Marissa. "A Curriculum on Gothic Literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/323631.
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Davison, Carol Margaret. "Gothic Cabala, the anti-semitic spectropoetics of British Gothic literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0002/NQ44401.pdf.
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Deans, Sharon. "Teen Gothic : sex, death and autonomy in young adult Gothic literature." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/15908.
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Adolescence – that tricky time when children have not yet reached adulthood – is a time of much disturbance, change and growth. Faced with a body that changes, stretches and grows in all directions, as does the mind, the adolescent finds that they are not who they once were, and that their concerns are not what they once were. According to David Punter, the nature of adolescence is integral to Gothic writing; for him, adolescence can be seen as a time when there is a fantasised inversion of boundaries: ‘where what is inside finds itself outside (acne, menstrual blood, rage) and what we think should be visibly outside (heroic dreams, attractiveness, sexual organs) remain resolutely inside and hidden’ (Punter 1998, 6). However, this is to ‘Gothicise’ adolescents - to view adolescents themselves as Gothic beings – rather than to understand what the true nature of their concerns and fears really are. This thesis intends to investigate, therefore, those fears and concerns as they are represented through the medium of Gothic texts written for adolescents. I propose to examine what happens to the Gothic mode in the gap between young children’s literature and adult fiction and will look at, through the Gothic lens, Young Adult literature which explores the teenager's relationships with issues such as sex, death and autonomy. As the Gothic is ‘erotic at root’ (Punter 1996, 191) and often focused on the centrality of sexuality, I explore the nature of ‘changing bodies’ and consider the adolescent’s burgeoning sexuality and desire for romantic relationships; however, the Gothic is not just about sex, and I also examine adolescent engagement with the concept of death, before finally going on to study issues of adolescent power and autonomy.
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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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Wilson, Mary E. "Gothic cathedral as theology and literature." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002826.
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Cartwright, Amy. "The future is Gothic : elements of Gothic in dystopian novels." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1346/.
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This thesis explores the relationship between the Gothic tradition and Dystopian novels in order to illuminate new perspective on the body in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (1999). The key concerns are those of the Labyrinth, Dark Places, Connectedness and the Loss of the Individual, Live Burials, Monsters and Fragmented Flesh. A thematic approach allows for the novels to be brought together under common Gothic themes in order to show not only that they have such tendencies, but that they share common ground as Gothic Dystopias. While the focus is on bodily concerns in these novels, it is also pertinent to offer a discussion of past critical perspectives on the Dystopia and this is undertaken in Chapter One. Chapter Two looks at the narrative structure of the novels and finds similarities in presentation to Gothic novels, which leads to exploration of the position of the body in such a narrative of the unseen. The third chapter looks to the spaces inhabited by characters in the novels to examine their impact on the threat faced by these individuals. The Gothic convention of doubling is the focus of Chapter Four, which finds not only doubling operating in Dystopian novels, but the more complex relationship of triangles of doubling holding characters, fixing them in relation to those around at the expense of selfhood. Chapter Five takes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s musings on the Gothic as its point of departure and finds that Dystopian bodies occupy a very similarly trapped position. Chapter Six identifies two types of monsters that inhabit the Gothic Dystopian space: those people who transform between the human and the monstrous, and those individuals who form a larger monster based on power that lives parasitically on transgressive bodies. The final chapter displays the impact of the Gothic Dystopia on individual bodies: ‘Fragmented Flesh’. The destruction of a coherent whole, a body with defined and sustainable boundaries, is the outcome of the novels where fear, repression, and the hidden combine to leave little space for cohesion and identification in the Gothic Dystopia.
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Maguire, Muireann. "Soviet Gothic-fantastic : a study of Gothic and supernatural themes in early Soviet literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/224215.
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This thesis analyses the persistence of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs in the literature of Soviet Russia between 1920 and 1940. Nineteenth-century Russian literature was characterized by the almost universal assimilation of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs, adapted from the fiction of Western writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allen Poe. Writers from Pushkin to Dostoevskii, including the major Symbolists, wrote fiction combining the real with the macabre and supernatural. However, following the inauguration of the Soviet regime and the imposition of Socialist Realism as the official literary style in 1934, most critics assumed that the Gothic-fantastic had been expunged from Russian literature. In Konstantin Fedin's words, the Russian fantastic novel had "умер и закопан в могилу". This thesis argues that Fedin's dismissal was premature, and presents evidence that Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs continued to play a significant role in several genres of Soviet fiction, including science fiction, satire, comedy, adventure novels (prikliuchenskie romany), and seminal Socialist Realist classics. My dissertation identifies five categories of Gothic-fantastic themes, derived jointly from analysis of canonical Gothic novels from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and from innovative approaches to the genre made by contemporary critics such as Fred Botting, Kelly Hurley, Diane Hoeveler, Elaine Showalter and Eric Naiman (whose book Sex in Public coined the phrase 'NEP Gothic'). Each chapter analyses one of these five Gothic themes or tropes in the context of selected Soviet Russian literary texts. The chronotope of Gothic space, epitomized in the genre as the haunted castle or house, is readdressed by Mikhail Bulgakov as the 'nekhoroshaia kvartira' of Master i Margarita and by Evgenii Zamiatin as the 'drevnyi dom' of his dystopian fantasy My. Gothic gender issues, including the subgenre of Female Gothic, arise in Nikolai Ognev's novels and Aleksandra Kollontai's stories. The Gothic obsession with dying, corpses and the afterlife re-emerges in fictions such as Daniil Kharms' 'Starukha' (whose hero is threatened by an animated corpse) and Nikolai Erdman's banned play Samoubiitsa (the story of a failed suicide). Gothic bodies (deformed or regressive human bodies) are contrasted with Stalinist cultural aspirations to somatic perfection within a utopian society. Typically Gothic monsters - vampires, ghosts, and demon lovers - are evaluated in a separate chapter. Each Gothic trope is integrated with my analysis of the relevant Soviet discourse, including early Communist attitudes to gender and the body and the philosopher Nikolai Federov's utopian belief in the possibility of universal resurrection. As my focus is thematic rather than author-centred, my field of research ranges from well-known writers (Fedor Gladkov, Bulgakov, Zamiatin) to virtual unknowns (Grigorii Grebnev and Vsevolod Valiusinskii, both early 1930s novelists), and recently rediscovered writers (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, Vladimir Zazubrin). Three Soviet authors who explicitly emulated the nineteenth-century Gothic-fantastic tradition in their fiction were Mikhail Bulgakov, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and A.V. Chaianov. Many mainstream Soviet writers also exploited Gothic-fantastic motifs in their work. Fedor Gladkov's Socialist Realist production novel, Tsement, uses the trope of the Gothic castle to dramatise the reclamation of a derelict cement factory by the workers. Nikolai Ognev's Dnevnik Kosti Riabtseva, the diary of an imaginary Communist schoolboy, relies on ghost stories to sustain suspense. Aleksandr Beliaev, the popular science fiction writer, inserted subversive clich's from the Gothic narrative tradition in his deceptively optimistic novels. Gothic-fantastic tropes and motifs were used polemically by dissident writers to subvert the monologic message of Socialist Realism; other writers, such as Gladkov and Marietta Shaginian, exploited the same material to support Communism and attack Russia's enemies. The visceral resonance of Gothic fear lends its metaphors unique political impact. This dissertation aims at an overall survey of Gothic-fantastic narrative elements in early Soviet literature rather than a conclusive analysis of their political significance. However, in conclusion, I speculate that the survival of the Gothic-fantastic genre in the hostile soil of the Stalinist literary apparatus proves that early Soviet literature was more varied, contradictory and self-interrogative than previously assumed.
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LaDuke, Aaron J. "Gothic Trends in Contemporary Great Plains Literature." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1368028912.
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Malone, Catherine. "Charlotte Bronte : Gothic autobiographies." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.385569.
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Pak, Chiu-shuen Tom, and 白昭璇. "Stephen King's popular Gothic: Gothic meta-fiction, ideology, scatology and (re)construction of community." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B37844325.
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Bodley, Antonie Marie. "Gothic horror, monstrous science, and steampunk." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Summer2009/a_bodley_052109.pdf.
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Pak, Chiu-shuen Tom. "Stephen King's popular Gothic Gothic meta-fiction, ideology, scatology and (re)construction of community /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2006. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B37844325.
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Malet-Dagreou, Cecile. "Evil in gothic fiction, 1764-1820." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313598.
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Michaud, Marilyn. "Republicanism and the American Gothic." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/110.
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Republicanism and the American Gothic is a comparative study of British and American literature and culture in the 1790s and 1950s. As the title indicates, this thesis explores the republican tradition of the British Enlightenment and the effect of its translation and migration to the American colonies. Specifically, it examines in detail the transatlantic influence of seventeenth and eighteenth century libertarian and anti-authoritarian thought on British and American Revolutionary culture. It argues that whether radical or orthodox, Whig or Tory, the quarrel surrounding the movement from subject to citizen nourishes Gothic aesthetics on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, particularly, the discourse of republicanism articulates not only the nation’s revolutionary goals, but defines national consciousness. This thesis further argues that republicanism is also a panic-ridden ideology, animated by fears of corruption, degeneration, and tyranny, and therefore supplies fertile ground for the development of a Gothic tradition in America. This dissertation then examines the continuing relevance of republican values and discourse in Cold War America. It suggests that the aesthetic, moral, and political imperatives that characterized republicanism in the late eighteenth century re-emerge in the post-war era as an antidote to the contemporary crisis in liberal subjectivity. In the Cold War, Gothic tales featuring doubles, vampires, and conspirators, not only dramatize contemporary fears of communism, conformity, and the rise of mass culture, but also engage with the nation’s historical fears of deception, corruption, degeneration, and tyranny. While grounded in the Gothic novel, this thesis is informed by the theory of republicanism that arose in the post-war years and which came to challenge many of the long held views of American revolutionary history. This thesis attempts to explore the influence of this historical approach on Cold War discourse generally, and on Gothic fiction specifically.
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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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Gadsby-Mace, C. E. "Narrating the nation : Britain in Gothic literature, 1760-1820." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2016. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/17497/.
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This thesis explores the work of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British authors who set their Gothic literature in Britain between 1760 and 1820. It argues that many of these novels have previously been marginalised or excluded from studies of the genre because they do not conform to the recognised Gothic trope of displacing anxieties onto foreign Catholic settings. Rather, they represent Britain as a fertile terrain for Gothic events. In doing so, they interrogate its history, national identity, and politics, as well as directly engaging with the domestic and international crises of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. They display a keen awareness not only of the historical development of the nation, but with its refashioning during this period in response to the 1707 Act of Union, the Seven Years’ War, the loss of the American colonies, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars: all of which challenged and complicated national identity. By analysing the work of Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith, William Henry Ireland, T. I. Horsley Curties and Walter Scott, this thesis demonstrates their shared preoccupation with the myth-making process of national history and collective identity formation, and with interrogating systems of power and leadership. ‘ Gothic’ developed as a historico-political term regarding the origins of British national identity, and as such the Gothic genre developed symbiotically alongside the Historical Romance and the national tale. Tracing the genesis of Gothic fiction back past Horace Walpole’ s 1764, The Castle of Otranto, to Thomas Leland’ s 1762 novel, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance, allows a new set of novels to be foregrounded in the genre. By refocusing critical attention on these texts, this project aims to extend the limits of this heterogeneous genre to include Gothic tales set in Britain. It also demonstrates the dialogue and dispute between Gothic texts as authors of disparate socio-political backgrounds engaged with one another through their fiction; borrowing, challenging, and redeploying generic tropes to support their political discourses.
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McKechnie, Claire Charlotte. "Human and the animal in Victorian gothic scientific literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5571.
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This doctoral thesis examines the role of animals in nineteenth-century science and Victorian Gothic fiction of the latter half of the century. It is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the interrelationship between science writings and literary prose and it seeks to place the Gothic animal body in its cultural and historical setting. This study is interested in the ways in which Gothic literature tests the limits of the human by using scientific ideas about disease, evolution, species confusion, and disability. In analysing the animal trope in Gothic scientific fiction, this thesis conceptualises the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in relation to, while setting itself apart from, contemporary scientific theories about humankind‘s place in the natural world. Chapter 1, 'Man‘s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog‘, focuses on the dog as an animal whose ability to carry and communicate deadly diseases to humans exemplified the breakdown of the animal-human boundary. I read late-nineteenth-century vampire and werewolf narratives as literary manifestations of social hysteria associated with dogs and rabies. In Chapter 2, 'Shaping Evolution: Amphibious Gothic in Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s The Coming Race and William Hope Hodgson‘s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, I examine the role of the frog in Victorian science as the background to Gothic fiction‘s portrayal of the Gothic body as an amphibious being. The next chapter explores the spider‘s function in Victorian natural history as the background to its role as a protean and unstable Gothic trope in fiction. Chapter four, 'Geological Underworlds: Mythologizing the Beast in Victorian Palaeontology‘, looks at ways in which the dinosaur in science influenced the literary imaginations of Gothic writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker. Under the title "Monsters Manufactured!": Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Victorian Gothic‘, the final chapter concludes the study with a discussion of freak culture, making key links between unusually-shaped people in society and human/animal hybrids in the Gothic fiction of H. G. Wells, Richard Marsh, and Wilkie Collins.
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Shlyak, Tatyana. "Secret as a key to narration : evolution from English Gothic to the Gothic in Dostoyevsky /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/6667.
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Tennant, Colette. "Margaret Atwood's transformed and transforming Gothic /." The Ohio State University, 1991. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487757723997751.
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Goode, Aaron T. "American Gothic: A Creative Exploration." University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton155653725057493.
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Kendrick-Alcántara, Carolyn. "Life among the living dead the Gothic horrors of Latin American literature /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1383468231&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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White, Troy Nelson. "The Gothic threshold of Sabine Baring-Gould : a study of the Gothic fiction of a Victorian squarson." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2010. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/35652/.
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This thesis is a study of the Gothic fiction of Sabine Baring-Gould (1834- 1924), with particular attention given to Baring-Gould’s roles as squire and parson. I have chosen to analyze two of Baring-Gould’s Gothic works, the novel Mehalah (1880) and the novella Margery of Quether (1884), both which allow a particularly profitable examination of the influence of Baring-Gould’s roles on his fiction. In studying these texts I apply my theory of Gothic fiction as a particularly modern genre built upon a "Gothic threshold," a meeting point of extreme opposites which ambivalently contrasts and merges the categories of the modern and the medieval. In the first chapter I describe how Baring-Gould’s unique Hegelian-influenced Tractarian philosophy influenced his creation of the dialectical setting of Mehalah. I argue that because of this influence Mehalah should be recognized as a significant contribution to the literature of the Oxford Movement. In the second chapter I argue that Mehalah’s historical setting in the time of the French Revolution and the influence of Wuthering Heights reinforce Mehalah’s use of the “Gothic threshold” structure and contribute to its theme of ambivalent progress. In the third chapter I discuss the influence of Baring-Gould’s sermon-writing on Mehalah and consider connections between Baring-Gould’s role as parson and the novel’s botched marriage theme. In the final chapter I discuss Margery of Quether as an innovation in the Gothic and vampire tradition as perhaps the only Gothic work that directly dramatizes the Land Law debate and presents that debate as a "Gothic" contest. I argue that Margery channels Baring-Gould’s tensions as a landowner. In the conclusion I argue that Mehalah and Margery display Baring-Gould’s technique of constructing miniature Gothic battles that relate to larger confrontations, and that the ultimate terror presented in these works is the conclusion of the battle between ancient and modern forces.
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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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Doolan, Emma D. "Hinterland Gothic: Reading and writing Australia's east coast hinterlands as Gothic spaces." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2018. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/115465/2/Doolan%20Hinterland%20Gothic%20exegesis.pdf.
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This practice-led thesis brings together creative writing practice with Gothic, spatial, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical theories to investigate Australia's east coast hinterlands as Gothic spaces in literature. It argues that the hinterland, literally the "land behind" or the region "lying beyond what is visible or known", functions as a liminal, heterotopic zone in which marginalised female, Indigenous, and ecological stories and histories are articulated through a Gothic "web of metaphor". Lush, fertile, and green, the hinterland disrupts dominant depictions of hostile, barren Australian landscapes with which Australian literary tradition and national identity have been bound up, unsettling dominant cultural narratives.
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Kuhn, W. J. "Edgar Allan Poe and American gothic literature : a historical study." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.374261.
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Quinn, Caroline. "Dueling Dualities: The Power of Architecture in American Gothic Literature." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/897.
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This article seeks to establish the importance of gothic convention and architecture’s role in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Southworth’s The Hidden Hand. By examining these stories’ dualities this article analyzes Poe and Southworth’s projects behind setting up dual spaces. Specific to Poe, this article follows architecture’s effect on mental health. Specific to Southworth, this article investigates her criticism of binaries and convention and how she uses architecture to shape her analysis.
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Pereira, Katia Silva. "The sublime and its different perspective in the gothic literature." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2015. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=9033.
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O objetivo da presente dissertação consiste em analisar o sublime, um conceito estético que vem sendo estudado desde os primeiros séculos. Tomamos como base a definição do sublime como algo paradoxal que cria o prazer e o medo ao mesmo tempo. Porém, o sublime apresenta especificidades que variam de acordo com o filósofo analisado. Neste trabalho, três críticos foram estudados: Longinus, Edmund Burke e Immanuel Kant. Assim, o sublime pode ser representado através da imensidão da natureza, do poder de uma criatura sobrenatural ou, até mesmo, através da sexualidade feminina. E, com o intuito de exemplificar essas diferentes perspectivas do sublime, buscamos obras da Literatura Gótica. Sendo esta uma vertente literária que buscava a oposição ao racionalismo trazido pelo movimento iluminista, as características sublimes foram essenciais para enfatizar a emoção. Para tal exemplificação, utilizamos trechos de dois romances góticos dos séculos XVIII e XIX, respectivamente: The Monk escrito por Matthew Lewis e Dracula escrito por Bram StokerThe objective of the present work is to analyze the sublime, an aesthetic concept which several theorists have been studying since the first centuries. Taking into consideration a definition which considers the sublime as something paradoxical raising pleasure and pain at the same time. However, there are some specificties which vary according to the philosopher being analyzed. This work deals with three of them: Longinus, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. So, the sublime can be represented by the vastness of nature, the power of a supernatural creature or, even, by the female sexuality. And, in order to exemplify these different perspectives of the sublime, we chose important novels in the Gothic literature. Since this type of fiction is aimed at opposing to the rationality brought by the Enlightenment, the sublime characteristics were essential to emphasize emotions. In order to exemplify this, two gothic novels were taken into consideration: The Monk written by Matthew Lewis in the 18th century and Dracula by Bram Stoker in the 19th century
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Strachan, John. "The politics of the Gothic novel 1764-1820." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.334232.
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Cooper, Jody. "Scaffold Fiction: Execution and Eighteenth-Century British Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20521.
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Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate.
The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth-century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers.
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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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Lawn, Jennifer. "Trauma and recovery in Janet Frame's fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq25087.pdf.
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Alshatti, Aishah. "Appropriations of the Gothic by Romantic-era women writers." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/232/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Levine, Jonathan David. "'One wiser, better, dearer than ourselves' : gothic friendship /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/6643.
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Stoddart, Helen. "Constructions of gender and hysteria in the modern Gothic." Thesis, University of Reading, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.306859.
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Stasiak, Lauren Anne. "Victorian professionals, intersubjectivity, and the fin-de-siecle gothic text /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9491.
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Yiannitsaros, Christopher. "Deadly domesticity : Agatha Christie's 'middlebrow' Gothic, 1930-1970." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/89292/.
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This thesis examines the use of the Gothic - genre of literary production deeply implicated with a set of patently middle class anxieties concerning the home - in the ‘middlebrow’ detective fiction of Agatha Christie, particularly within her novels authored in the forty year period between 1930 and 1970. It is argued that there are five different ‘types’ of Gothic at work in Christie’s fiction: the haunted house narrative; the Gothic village; Gay Gothic; Post-WWII Gothic; and Brontë Gothic. This thesis moreover suggests that Christie’s employment and development of these Gothic sub-genres is often achieved via nineteenth-century interlocutors, with Christie’s fiction drawing heavily upon, and in some cases ‘re-imagining’, some of the cornerstones of Victorian Gothic literature. In doing so, this thesis sets out to problematize Alison Light’s famous characterisation of Christie as a ‘modernist […] iconoclast’ whose fiction nonchalantly shatters ‘Victorian images of home, sweet home’. Instead, it is argued that Christie’s use of the Gothic speaks of a relationship with nineteenth-century literary culture which far more complicated: a contradictory interplay of simultaneous desire and distance characteristic of the ‘middlebrow’ fiction produced by women writers of this time. This thesis reads Christie’s use of the Gothic historically, seeking to both firmly situate her work within its contemporary historical contexts - particularly in relation to debates regarding the family, domestic space, and the birth of what Nicola Humble has termed the birth of ‘the new cult of the domestic’ after the First World War - and to elucidate the nineteenth-century contexts which she additionally draws upon. Ultimately, in reading instances of domestic Gothicism as they occur across her oeuvre, this thesis makes a case for the valuable historically-specific cultural critiques made by one who, at least in the popular imagination, is positioned as such an avowedly ‘conservative’ writer.
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Rae, Angela Lynn. "The haunted bedroom: female sexual identity in Gothic literature, 1790-1820." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002294.
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This thesis explores the relationship between the Female Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the social context of women at that time. In the examination of the primary works of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, this study investigates how these female writers work within the Gothic genre to explore issues related to the role of women in their society, in particular those concerned with sexual identity. It is contended that the Gothic genre provides these authors with the ideal vehicle through which to critique the patriarchal definition of the female, a definition which confines and marginalizes women, denying the female any sexual autonomy. The Introduction defines the scope of the thesis by delineating the differences between the Female Gothic and the Male Gothic. Arguing that the Female Gothic shuns the voyeuristic victimisation of women which characterizes much of the Male Gothic, it is contended that the Female Gothic is defined by its interest in, and exploration of, issues which concern the status of women in a patriarchy. It is asserted that it is this concern with female gender roles that connects the overtly radical work of Mary Wollstonecraft with the oblique critique evident in her contemporary, Ann Radcliffe’s, novels. It is these concerns too, which haunt Mary Shelley’s texts, published two decades later. Chapter One outlines the status of women in the patriarchal society of the late eighteenth century, a period marked by political and social upheaval. This period saw the increasing division of men and women into the “separate spheres” of the public and domestic worlds, and the consequent birth of the ideal of “Angel in the House” which became entrenched in the nineteenth century. The chapter examines how women writers were influenced by this social context and what effect it had on the presentation of female characters in their work, in particular in terms of their depiction of motherhood. Working from the premise that, in order to fully understand the portrayal of female sexuality in the texts, the depiction of the male must be examined, Chapter Two analyses the male characters in terms of their relationship to the heroines and/or the concept of the “feminine”. Although the male characters differ from text to text and author to author, it is argued that in their portrayal of “heroes and villains” the authors were providing a critique of the patriarchal system. While some of the texts depict male characters that challenge traditional stereotypes concerning masculinity, others outline the disastrous and sometimes fatal consequences for both men and women of the rigid gender divisions which disallow the male access to the emotional realm restricted by social prescriptions to the private, domestic world of the female. It is contended that, as such, all of the texts assert the necessity for male and female, masculine and feminine to be united on equal terms. Chapter Three interprets the heroine’s journey through sublime landscapes and mysterious buildings as a journey from childhood innocence to sexual maturity, illustrating the intrinsic link that exists between the settings of Gothic novels and female sexuality. The chapter first examines the authors’ use of the Burkean concept of the sublime and contends that the texts offer a significant revision of the concept. In contrast to Burke’s overtly masculinist definition of the sublime, the texts assert that the female can and does have access to it, and that this access can be used to overcome patriarchal oppression. Secondly, an analysis of the image of the castle and related structures reveals that they can symbolise both the patriarchy and the feminine body. Contending that the heroine’s experiences within these structures enable her to move from innocence to experience, it is asserted that the knowledge that she gains, during her journeys, of herself and of society allows her to assert her independence as a sexually adult woman.
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Hudson, Kathleen. "'Tell it my own way' : servant narratives in early Gothic literature." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2015. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/12555/.
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Early Gothic novels produced between 1764 and the 1800s developed the literary tropes and mechanisms which define an enduring and complex genre. As such, the ubiquitous servant characters in the British Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries play particularly important roles as highly self-conscious Gothic narrators and storytellers, roles which have not been fully acknowledged or explored within Gothic criticism. Servant characters ‘narrate,’ verbally and through a physical performance, stories and constructions of identity in the works of the most critical early Gothic writers, namely Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charlotte Dacre. Such narratives deconstruct and interrogate social and personal identity through their manipulation of Gothic anxieties, and are critical to fully understanding the development of the Gothic genre. The earliest Gothic servant narrators, found in the works of Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve, help develop a new kind of ‘romance’ novel within a national literary identity. Later authors extend this further by casting servants as authorial metonyms who investigate the boundaries of the genre and techniques of Gothic storytelling. Ann Radcliffe demonstrates a conscious engagement with her servants as narrators, and her works provide great insight into the political, psychological, and literary potential of servant narratives. Matthew Lewis and Charlotte Dacre expand on these techniques by not only illustrating their characters’ authorial identities more overtly, but by also emphasizing their servants’ ability to create physical Gothic realities which correspond with their narrative goals. Thus servants within the Gothic literary tradition reflect generic goals by destabilizing hegemonic methods of ‘knowing’ and ‘performing’. They assert their own counter-narrative and therein compromise the identities of those around them. This dissertation will prove that Gothic servant narratives have a profound impact on readings of the individual texts, of the Gothic genre, and on narrative studies in general. This research will ultimately ensure that the Gothic servant narrative’s incorporation into developing literary criticism will open new doors for Gothic and literary studies, as well as providing significant insight into established areas of academic inquiry.
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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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Li, Wanlin. "Global Ambiguity in Early American Gothic: A Cultural Rhetorical Analysis." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1433333747.
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Orlandi, Aline Cristina Sola. "Entre lobos e lobisomens : feminismo, pornografia e gótico nos contos de Angela Carter /." Araraquara, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/141923.
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Orientador: Aparecido Donizete RossiBanca: Fernanda Aquino Sylvestre
Banca: Alcides Cardoso dos Santos
Resumo: A presente dissertação de mestrado pretende elucidar à luz de teorias feministas e do gênero gótico algumas técnicas de escrita utilizadas por Angela Carter na reescrita do conto de fadas "Chapeuzinho Vermelho", como forma de subversão de discursos patriarcais e desconstrução de todo um imaginário ocidental de subjugo e vitimização da mulher. Carter revisita os contos de fadas mais populares, na coletânea The Bloody Chamber and other stories, subvertendo padrões estruturais desses contos e também a posição da mulher como vítima passiva recorrente em alguns contos de fadas e na literatura gótica. Através dos contos "The Werewolf" e "The Company of Wolves" presentes na referida coletânea, pretende-se explorar como Carter faz uso de elementos do gótico para construir uma atmosfera de terror, que representa os perigos que a heroína terá que enfrentar para chegar ao final da trajetória e conquistar um prazer total (Jouissance), que ocorrerá através de sua independência econômica, social, sexual e imaginária. E como Carter propõe uma pornografia aliada à mulher, que a empodere e a ajude a descobrir sua identidade, para, assim, retomar seu lugar de igualdade com o homem na sociedade. Além disso, pretende-se elucidar, também, como a autora subverte o Gênero Gótico e os Contos de fadas, bem como a própria Pornografia e os discursos anti-pornografia do movimento feminista.
Abstract: This master's thesis aims to elucidate through feminist theories and the Gothic genre some writing techniques used by Angela Carter in the rewriting of the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" as a form of subversion of patriarchal discourses and deconstruction of an entire western imaginary subjugation and victimization of woman. Carter revisits the most popular fairy tales in the collection The Bloody Chamber and other stories, subverting structural patterns of these stories and also woman's position as recurring passive victim in some fairy tales and gothic literature. Through the tales "The Werewolf" and "The Company of Wolves", present in said collection, is intended to explore how Carter makes use of Gothic elements to build an atmosphere of terror, representing the dangers that the heroine will have to face to reach the end of the path and win a total pleasure (Jouissance), through its economic, social, sexual and imaginary independence. And how Carter proposes an ally pornography to woman, that empowers and helps her discover her identity, to thus repossess her place of equality with man in society. In addition, we intend to clarify, also, as the author subverts the Gender Gothic and Fairy tale, and the very Pornography and anti-pornography feminist movement speeches.
Mestre
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El, Inglizi Najwa Yousif. "Negotiating the gothic in the fiction of Thomas Hardy." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2003. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/112/.
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The purpose of this research is to investigate Thomas Hardy’s relation to the Gothic tradition, especially that deriving from the classic period 1760-mid-1820s. The main novels chosen for such an investigation are Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Parallels with the following texts form the heart of the thesis: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin, Caleb Williams, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. This investigation has been instigated by three major elements noted in the criticism on Hardy’s literary art in general and on his tragedies in particular. First, although Hardy scholars employ terminology pertaining to the Gothic and romance genres in describing Hardy’s plots, characters and settings, very few of them make a direct and explicit connection to the Gothic novel. Second, the few who do broach the Gothic elements in Hardy’s fiction limit their understanding of the kind of Gothic Hardy employs mainly to the second quarter of the nineteenth century and onwards. Moreover, they seem to be more willing to admit such influence in his minor works, obfuscating the influence of Gothic discourse on his major novels. Therefore, this research will attempt to investigate Hardy’s involvement with Gothic discourse and examine the ways in which the characteristic settings, drama and character-types of such discourse are domesticated, complicated and made more subtle in Hardy’s work. Finally, it envisages further investigation into Hardy’s work in its relation to his architectural knowledge and his philosophic views of life in general, and his views of humanity’s place in it in particular.
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Cohenour, Gretchen M. "Eighteenth-century Gothic novels and gendered spaces : what's left to say? /." View online ; access limited to URI, 2008. http://0-digitalcommons.uri.edu.helin.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI3314452.
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Knight, Robert C. A. "Pursuing the fugitive figure : a genealogy of gothic fugitivity /." View thesis, 1999. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/27799.
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Mahato, Susmita. "Gothic pathologies : disease and discourse in nineteenth-century narrative /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3102178.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-203). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Foulds, Alexandra Laura. "Gothic monster fiction and the 'novel-reading disease', 1860-1900." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30684/.
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This thesis scrutinises the complex ‘afterlife’ of sensation fiction in the wake of the 1860s and ‘70s, after the end of the period that critics have tended to view as the heyday of literary sensationalism. It identifies and explores the consistent framing of sensation fiction as a pathological ‘style of writing’ by middle-class critics in the periodical press, revealing how such responses were moulded by new and emerging medical research into the nervous system, the cellular structure of the body, and the role played by germs in the transmission of diseases. Envisioned as a disease characterised by its new immersive and affective reading process, sensation fiction was believed to be infecting its readers. It infiltrated their nervous systems, instigating a process of metamorphosis that gradually depleted their physical and mental integrity and reduced them to a weakened, ‘flabby’, ‘limp’ state. The physical boundaries of the body, however, were not the only limits that sensation fiction seemed to wilfully disregard. ‘[S]preading in all directions’, it contaminated other modes, other media, and other kinds of recreational entertainment, making them equally sensational and pathological. One of these modes was Gothic monster fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, which was repeatedly labelled ‘sensational’ and described as generating the same cardiovascular responses as works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry Wood. This infection of fin de siècle Gothic fiction by literary sensationalism can be gauged in the plots and monsters that those texts portray. Gothic monster narratives at the end of the nineteenth century are shaped by the concerns at the heart of middle-class commentators’ responses to sensation fiction, and by the medical lexicon employed to vocalise these anxieties. Monstrosity is linked to contagion and stimulation, as the monster seems to pollute all those with whom it comes into contact. It triggers a process of degeneration and debilitation akin to that associated with the reading of sensation fiction, producing a host of ‘shocked’, nervous, or hysterical characters. Encounters with the monster are linked to recreational reading or other kinds of behaviour that such reading became associated with, such as thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and illicit sexual desire. The result is a group of texts in which the monster embodies the same threat to boundaries, as well as individual, and, at times, national health that middle-class reviewers associated with literary sensationalism.