Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Gothic'

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.

This thesis examines forms of Gothic fiction on television, and defines the ways in which television produces Gothic drama which is medium-specific (e.g. formally distinct from versions of the genre in other media). This work employs a textual analysis to explore Gothic television, and combines this with archival research and an examination of the changing climate of television production in a range of national and historical contexts. The thesis is organised into four case studies, each dealing with different national industries during different periods: British anthology drama of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Mystery and Imagination (ABC/Thames, 1966-70), Ghost Story for Christmas (BBC1, 1971-78)); Danish art television in the mid-nineties (Riget (Danmarks Radio/Zentropa, 1994)); British adaptations of female Gothic literature, (e.g. Rebecca (BBC2, 1979), The Wyvern Mystery (BBC1/The Television Production Company, 2000); and big-budget, effects-laden series from North America in the 1990s (e.g. American Gothic, CBS/Renaissance, 1995-96), Millennium (20th Century Fox/10:13, 1996-1999). I argue that Gothic television plays on the genre's inherent fascination with the domestic/familial, to produce television drama with an overt consciousness of the contexts in which the programmes are being viewed, a consciousness which is locatable within the text itself; as such, the thesis defines the Gothic as a genre which is well suited to presentation on television. Furthermore, an examination is offered of the 'model' viewer as presented within the television text, enabling an understanding of the ways in which conceptions of television viewership are inscribed into television drama at the moment of production. I also interrogate the notion that television is an 'uncanny' medium by locating the precise sources of uncanniness with Gothic television, and delineate the ways in which innovations in television production have been showcased through the representation of the supernatural and the uncanny with Gothic Television.

Despite increasing critical interest in Gothic in non-Western cultures, Turkish Gothic writing remains an undiscovered area of research within worldwide Gothic studies. My thesis fills this gap by bringing together Glennis Byron’s concept of ‘globalgothic’, historically informed understandings of the Gothic and Turkish national identity to theorise Turkish Gothic as a mode intimately linked to the ideological processes of Turkish identity construction. Central to this thesis is the understanding of Turkish national identity as a fragmented construct due to Turkey’s ambivalent relationship with the West over the centuries and its commonly referenced role as a bridge between the West and the East. Accordingly, the thesis begins by positioning Turkey in relation to its historical and cultural ties to the Western Gothic tradition. I reveal the origins of the multidirectional flows of globalgothic between Western and Turkish Gothic traditions, through the examination of selected works from British and American cultures depicting Turkish identity through a Gothic lens. Thereafter, taking particular times of political and social change in Turkey into account, I focus on novels and films from 1923 to 2017, with regards to their employment and transformation of Western Gothic tropes using discussions of Turkish national identity. I argue that Turkish Gothic manifests the nation’s anxieties concerning the in-betweenness of Turkish national identity and its ideological repercussions as being either Western and secular or Eastern and conservative. In doing so, the Gothic in Turkey interchangeably becomes a counternarrative for both ideologies, each demonising and undermining the other, and therefore representing the tension between two poles of the political spectrum in contemporary Turkey. As the definitions of Turkish national identity change according to the emerging political stresses in Turkey, Turkish Gothic will continue to haunt its audiences with the dark undersides of Turkishness.

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.

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.

The project explores the ‘Gothic Line’ as observed in ornament. Escaping strictly geometrical means of defining, the study focuses on capturing the Line’s elusive properties in connection to chosen architectural elements. With selected properties, the two-dimensional principles are extracted into the 3D environment. Using parametric design tools each feature is transformed into multiple prototypes of three-dimensional interpretation. The project aims to capture subtlety of the Gothic Line while providing a system enabling creation of architecturally relevant ornamental structures.

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

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.

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

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

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.

This dissertation delineates a range of literary endeavors engaging the gothic contours of child life in early to mid-twentieth century America. Drawing fresh attention to fictional representations of the child in modernist narratives, I show how writers such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter turned to childhood as a potent site for negotiating cultural anxieties about physical and cultural reproduction. I reveal the implications of modernist technique for the historical formation of American childhood, demonstrating how these texts intervened in national debates about sexuality, race, and futurity. Each dissertation chapter adopts a comparative approach, indicating a shared investment in a specific formulation of the gothic child. Barnes and Faulkner, in creating the child-woman, appraise how the particular influence of psychoanalysis on childhood innocence irrevocably alters the cultural landscape. Faulkner and Toomer, through the spectral child, evaluate the exclusionary racial politics surrounding interracial intimacy which impact kinship structures in the U.S. South. Welty and Porter, in spotlighting the orphan girl-child, assess the South’s gendered social matrix through the child’s consciousness. Finally, Faulkner, in addressing children as a readership in his little-known gothic fable, The Wishing Tree, produces a compelling site to examine the relationship between literature written for the child and modernist artistic practice.

This thesis approaches the poetry and devotional prose of Christina Rossetti from a new angle, examining the possibility that her work may demonstrate the influence of Gothic literature, which Rossetti read during childhood and in her early career as a poet. Though both during her lifetime and in more recent critical studies, her work has been considered mostly with regard to her Tractarian faith and her gender, this thesis will argue that Rossetti's work is preoccupied with Gothic, often in unexpected ways. This examination of Rossetti's Work in the light of Gothic both complements and augments, rather than superseding, criticism which examines her work from theological or feminist viewpoints. This study approaches Gothic as a fractured genre, which manifests an assortment of tropes, motifs and styles which have come to be identified by the general term of Gothic. To read Rossetti's work as fractured Gothic opens up a new perspective, one which situates her Work in a different milieu, and which is significant for the study of Rossetti's work, but which also provides a different way of reading Gothic. This thesis engages with recent criticism of Rossetti as well as with work on Gothic, examining aspects of Rossetti's work which were previously neglected, particularly in a sustained consideration of poetry as a vehicle for Gothic. To read Rossetti's poetry as Gothic raises and examines issues that have been overlooked, as well as opening up works by Rossetti that remain largely neglected. The Work of Christina Rossetti raises important questions about the relationship between Gothic and Christianity which this thesis will explore.

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.

This paper proposes to approach the representation of the House of Fame with a close re-reading and a synthesis of previous historiography and literary theory in an attempt to address the problem of representation and ‘story-telling’ within the description of the Gothic edifice. How does Chaucer tell the story of “Gothic,” how does he represent a Gothic image? Regardless of the precedent and source for Chaucer’s description of the House of Fame, the important feature of the image is the representation of the Gothic edifice in words, which requires elaborate metaphors and capturing the Gothic structure as a mnemonic image. I would like to specifically engage how Chaucer works to describe and represent Gothic architecture in words. I will argue that the failure of language and a common literary trope known as the ‘inexpressibility topos’ figure prominently in Chaucer’s description; that Chaucer posits himself into the ‘role of the interlocutor’ to give the architectural edifice meaning and ultimately presents an invitation for interpretation.

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.

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.

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.

En 1908 H. James s’interroge sur l’absence de personnages d’enfants hantés dans la littérature. Il croit l’idée inexploitée et la développe en tant qu’amusette gothique, la première en son genre – “a perfectly clear field”. Avait-il raison? Au premier abord, le gothique s’intéresse peu à l’enfant. La figure de l’enfant est prise pour résidu du roman sentimental dont le vrai roman gothique est dépourvu. La thématique est étiquetée “gothique féminin” ou “domestique”–on préfère parler d’éducation et de morale pour expliquer le monde des plus jeunes. Pourtant, certains romans mettent en scène les parcours initiatiques d’enfants. Comme les adultes, ils sont confrontés à la souffrance, à la mort. L’accumulation de terreurs les place face à l’au-delà omniprésent. Les revenants subvertissent leur monde et créent un milieu particulier, un espace intermédiaire où la vie et la mort sont en contact. La mort et l’érotisme du monde gothique se mêlent à la morale et au didactisme, visant l’initiation de l’enfant sans pour autant l’expliciter. Les personnages d’enfants deviennent bien plus que de simples accessoires. L’objet de cette recherche est de s’interroger sur la place de l’enfant dans le roman gothique, de dresser son portrait, d’examiner sa représentation sur le plan social, politique et religieux, de définir le personnage type de l’enfant gothique. Nous explorons divers aspects afin de comprendre la conception et l’évolution de ce personnage. Nous retrouvons ici un nombre considérable d’enfants dans un corpus de plus de 100 romans pour analyser leurs rôles, les différents aspects sous lesquels ils sont présentés, et essayer de démontrer leur importance au sein du mouvement
In 1908 H. James wondered about the absence of haunted children in literature. He believes that the idea is underdeveloped and decides to create a gothic amusette, the first of its kind in “a perfectly clear field”. Was he right? On a first glance, gothic is not concerned with the figure of the child. Children are sometimes taken as a residue from the sentimental novel, a residue of which the real gothic novel stands free, and whenever children are present, the genre is labelled “feminine” or “domestic” gothic. Thus, some prefer to write of education and ethics when dealing with children and childhood in such novels. However, some novels set in motion childhood journeys of self-discovery and identity quests. Like the adults, these children are confronted with suffering and death. The accumulation of terrors places them in contact with an omnipresent underworld. Beings crawl out of there to haunt them, writings appear, memories emerge. Gothic children are thus places in contact with the past, with the world of the dead, and stand as symbols of the future. They represent the link between past and present and their characters evolve into more than attributes of the adult persona. The aim of this thesis is to question the presence of children in the gothic novel, to describe and analyse the portraits of children and their representation on social, political and religious level and to, finally, define the typical gothic child. The research spans different aspects of the gothic novel in order to cover as large a period as possible, to demonstrate the evolution of the child character in gothic and to stress the importance of the child within the movement

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.

Ridefinizione del tema delle origini dei Goti secondo il recente dibattito e indagine storico-prosopografica basata su fonti narrative, documentarie, archeologiche ed epigrafiche sulla fisionomia identitaria e sociale degli Ostrogoti insediati in Italia e sopravvissuti nel periodo successivo alla Guerra Greco-Gotica (dalla seconda metà del VI sec. d.C..), con particolare attenzione alle aree di dominio bizantino. Il lascito della loro memoria etnica, storica e istituzionale nel Regnum longobardo e in alcune fonti narrative italiane medievali.
Redefinition of the Goths-origins them in the recent debate, and historical -prosopographical research based on narrative, documentary, archaeological and epigraphic sources about the identity and social make-up of living and surviving Ostrogoths in Italy after the Greek-Gothic War (from 2nd half of VIth century), particularly for the areas under Byzantine rule. The heritage of their ethnic, historical, and institutional remembrance in the Lombard kingdom and in some Italian middle-age narrative sources.

Ridefinizione del tema delle origini dei Goti secondo il recente dibattito e indagine storico-prosopografica basata su fonti narrative, documentarie, archeologiche ed epigrafiche sulla fisionomia identitaria e sociale degli Ostrogoti insediati in Italia e sopravvissuti nel periodo successivo alla Guerra Greco-Gotica (dalla seconda metà del VI sec. d.C..), con particolare attenzione alle aree di dominio bizantino. Il lascito della loro memoria etnica, storica e istituzionale nel Regnum longobardo e in alcune fonti narrative italiane medievali.
Redefinition of the Goths-origins them in the recent debate, and historical -prosopographical research based on narrative, documentary, archaeological and epigraphic sources about the identity and social make-up of living and surviving Ostrogoths in Italy after the Greek-Gothic War (from 2nd half of VIth century), particularly for the areas under Byzantine rule. The heritage of their ethnic, historical, and institutional remembrance in the Lombard kingdom and in some Italian middle-age narrative sources.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Mississippi, 2009.
Typescript. Vita. "May 2009." Major Professor: Colby Kullman Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-142). Also available online via ProQuest to authorized users.

In this essay, the author analyzes the Gothic of Christina Rossetti in such poems as A Coast Nightmare, Shut Out, but also the well-known Goblin Market and the Prince's Progress. Interested in what the imagery of these poems convey, and intent on declaring Rossetti as a prominent example of Gothic poets, the author makes a strong case for the including of Rossetti among the great Gothics.

In this thesis I will analyze representations of incest in the Gothic from 1764-1847 and argue that the genre's critical genealogy, beginning with its contemporary reception, has viewed the Gothic as divided into a male tradition or its female counter, and subsequently informed understandings of incest as having distinct meanings produced by their presence in works designated as male or female. Although feminist criticism from the 1970s onwards has demonstrated that women writers articulated subversive views in the Gothic, such analyses have relied on psychological and sociological theories of incest that frequently reproduce gendered di visions and fai l comprehensively to address the incest thematic. It is instead essential to do away with the genre's gendered bifurcation and employ a broad methodological framework that applies the insights in recent work by anthropologists, feminist, social, and queer theorists, geneticists, and legal and social historians to specific incestuous configurations. In so doing, I argue that the genre's complex depictions and disruptions of eighteenth-century ideologies of gender and sexuality are revealed through incestuous desires, threats, violence and transgressions. This thesis is comprised of five chapters that explore the social, sexual and legal anxieties underlying representations of incest in different family relationships in the Gothic and contextualizes these accounts within analytic lenses suited to the particular kinship bond. It examines the ability of father-daughter incest to offer female sexual agel]cy and to breakdown the exchange of women, and investigates the potential for equality in _sibling relationships that troubled contemporary ideas of desire and laws as ,inherent~y-natural or-unnatural. It explores the sexual threats of uncles towards nieces that literalize the female body's status as property, and how cousin marriage negotiated the changing status of family and the conflict between individual desires and obligation to the family as state. It analyzes how mother-son incest exposes the inadequacy of availab le gender and sexual ideologies to account for female desire, agency and aggression. Through these analyses I argue that Gothic writers use the incest convention in order to reveal the arbitrary legal, economic and social limitations on behaviour that are enforced by heteronormative culture and offer alternative models of family, sexuality and desire that counter the hegemony.

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

This transdisciplinary thesis excavates the critically-neglected Gothic convention of the maternal tyrant through the theoretical framework of the maternal gaze, recently conceptualised by Alina Luna in Visual Perversity: A Re-articulation of the Maternal Instinct (2004). As a counter-response to the critical heritage of feminist and film scholarship which privileges the presence of an objectifying and fetishising male gaze, Luna argues that the maternal gaze issued from the womb is the most powerful and fatal because it is concerned with nothing apart from devouring the child and reinstalling it in the mother’s body, and punishing the paternal order which had taken it away. Examining how the Gothic articulates intra-uterine symbols and structures, I consider a spectrum of written and visual texts to argue that an omnipotent maternal gaze is pathologically narrativised by the genre. The thesis is structured in three parts of two chapters each which plot the evolution of the maternal gaze in the Gothic. In Part One, ‘The Gothic Heritage’, I discuss maternal symbolism and structures in folkloric and Victorian Gothic texts to show how the infanticidal maternal gaze has existed in the genre since its inception, while Part Two, ‘Gothic Practices’, reveals how the maternal gaze in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries used the intersecting technological and religious practices of photography, Spiritualism and Marian iconography to Gothicise the domestic space of the maternal practitioner. Part Three comes home to ‘The Gothic Domestic’, which examines how narratives of child abuse, incest and trauma are perpetuated in the domestic space for the maternal gaze through modes of serialisation, and I conclude by showing how the internet has become the modern Gothic web in which the maternal gaze weaves hypertextual narratives through which mothers meditate on and reproduce the image of the abused and traumatised child. This thesis provides new directions for genre criticism and gaze theory, and drawing on feminist, film and psychoanalytic scholarship I use the maternal gaze to write a place for the maternal tyrant in the Gothic, one which she has previously been denied by the critical and cultural blindness to the capabilities of maternal desire.

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

This 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.

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