The topic of this thesis is the gothic fiction of Selma Lagerlöf. Its primary purpose is to investigate how Lagerlöf's work can be understood in relation to the gothic genre; what particular themes, motifs and formal aspects appear when making this connection and how they can be interpreted, as well as which literary and cultural contexts become relevant. The study is based on close readings of six short stories that, in comparison, appear to be some of the most gloomy and horrific in her production: "Karln. En julsägen" (1891), "De fågelfrie", "Stenkumlet", "Riddardottern och havsmannen" (1892), "Spökhanden" (1898) and "Frid på jorden" (1917). The gothic was an important feature of the literature of the last decade of the nineteenth century, when Lagerlöf made her debut. Therefore one of the main purposes of this study is to highlight her as one of the key writers of gothic fiction in Sweden by the time. In this context the gothic might be considered as closely related to the currents of decadence and fin-de-siècle. However, the gothic continued to be an important element throughout Lagerlöf's production, and this is illustrated by the inclusion of a story from a later period among the primary sources. The gothic genre can be defined by certain themes and motifs, but also by its narrative strategies. The analyses of the six stories show how themes and composition are used to create an atmosphere of fear and darkness, but also, more importantly, to create a sense of ambiguity. The study also discusses the relationship between the gothic and the fantastic and special attention is paid to aspects such as the hesitation concerning how to interpret the supernatural, as well as the fragmentary bodies and psyches of the stories. The main themes of the six stories can be summarized as dealing with the haunting and return of the past, as well as the fear associated with the transgression of limits - between fantasy and reality, the civilized and the primitive, life and death and self and other. Central to the argument in this study is das Unheimliche - the uncanny - a concept that links a certain kind of fear to uncertainty, doubles, ghostliness and haunting. Sigmund Freud has described it as a paradox, as something terrifyingly strange and yet familiar at the same time. The gothic reproduces the experience of reality expressed by this concept - a sense that the self is the source of horror and that identity is something highly unstable.

My project examines the phenomenon of the hazy spaces on the periphery of the antebellum imagination that, while existing geographically at the very fringes of daily American life, are nonetheless active in the conceptualization, production, and representation of an idiosyncratic American sense of space: an anxiety of spatial fragmentation, formlessness, and modulation. In particular I am interested in Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and Melville's “Benito Cereno,” both of which deal with American transoceanic travel to the proximity of Antarctica and its surrounding seas. These gothicized nautical fictions demonstrate an important dialectic playing out in these extreme spaces: the oscillating experience of external and closed space. What becomes detectable in antebellum literature in which spaces of enclosure interrupt expansiveness are far-reaching, deeply-rooted anxieties of an ever-transforming American space at risk of fragmenting and necessitating reorientation via the sort of imaginary travel texts being examined.

Despite its monumental scale, its position at a turning point in the development of Gothic architecture and its visionary spatial conception, the cathedral of Bourges has remained an anomaly of medieval architectural history. Conceived and built concurrently with the cathedral of Chartres, Bourges has persistently been viewed as the lesser of the two buildings. This thesis attempts to contextualize supposed irregularities of Bourges' design and to review existing historiographical notions of the building in order to rearticulate its artistic character and redefine its historic position. Historically, Bourges has been overshadowed by the greater success of Chartres as a model on which subsequent buildings were based. In turn, the somewhat fragmented acceptance of Bourges' ideals has led to an historiography in which the building is perceived as a series of individual elements rather than as the embodiment of a powerfully focused vision. These factors, and the resulting insistent comparisons of Bourges with Paris as an antecedent and with Chartres as a contemporary, have nurtured a significant bias against Bourges and a consequent disparity in studies of High Gothic architecture. In seeking to redefine the role of Bourges in the history of Gothic architecture, it is essential to identify the unifying force which motivated the first architect of the building who envisioned the original design which was preserved, virtually intact, throughout the building's sixty-year period of construction. At Bourges, it was a fascination with spatial amplitude on a very large scale which fueled the builder's efforts, and it was toward the goal of spatial equilibrium that all elements of the building were oriented. The designer's highly integrated spatial conception was concretized through his use of form and structure, resulting in a building of powerful homogeneity. In the creation of its spatial configuration, and with respect to those buildings influenced by it, Bourges' elevation and structure are its most distinctive features. Bourges' elevation consists of five levels distributed over three planes, resulting in simultaneously two and three dimensional characteristics. The complete three-story elevation of the inner aisle is amply visible through the very tall main arcades so that the two elevations form a single aesthetic unit. At the same time, the three planes differentiate the volumes of the building without being spatially divisive. The elevation's individual components provide an element of vertical continuity while the multiplicity of its planes assures an expansiveness of space throughout the building. Although the elevation is perhaps a more obvious feature of the building's spatial configuration, Bourges' singular vision is no less a function of its structure. The flying buttress, which was introduced towards the end of the twelfth century, provided a powerful structural tool for the builders of both Chartres and Bourges because it provided the technology necessary to build very high, vaulted buildings without using a cumbersome, galleried construction. The artistic emancipation resulting from the use of the flying buttress provided a strong impetus, not only to re-evaluate the Early Gothic aesthetic, but also to develop an entirely new appreciation of structure itself. The Bourges architect capitalized on both aspects of the flying buttress, availing of the artistic opportunities it gave to the building as a whole, and of the aesthetic properties inherent within it. Bourges' flyers manifest a clear understanding of the structural dynamics of masonry construction and a profound desire to exalt those structural properties to a point where they visually contribute to the realization of the designer's spatial concept. They are daringly slender, steeply profiled, supporting members which transfer the thrust of the main vaults to the heads of similarly slight pier buttresses. The designer audaciously employed very spare supporting members, not only to economize on the amount of material used, but also to reduce the elements to essential visual minima. The flyers create the characteristically erect exterior profile of the building and provide a unifying element for its three tiers which correspond to the interior volumes. They are not only vital to the stability of the building but also to its appearance, betraying the designer's awareness of the aesthetic potential of structure which sets him apart from his contemporaries. Unlike Chartres, Bourges' vision was rarely reformulated in its entirety; its success as a whole was too heavily dependent on the building's size and particular configuration. Although its elevation was rearticulated in several buildings in France, Spain, and even Italy, and the building's structural system was extremely precocious, Bourges' design never became an architectural formula because it was ill-adapted to the thirteenth-century liturgy. Its lack of a transept and the consequent unification of space failed to reflect the separation of laity and clergy which became increasingly marked in the liturgy from the twelfth century on. Furthermore, the building did not provide the variety of liturgical spaces requisite to thirteenth-century worship. Although Bourges failed to make as visible and lasting an impression on subsequent buildings as Chartres, it represents a profoundly unique architectural statement which marks a particular, creative moment in the history of medieval architecture. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation examines the way the work of two nineteenth-century American authors, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, borrowed from, challenged, and even worked to support prevailing cultural attitudes, conventions, and ideas regarding death, mourning and memorializing as they produced their poems and tales, articulated their thoughts regarding the purpose and act of producing and reading literature, and designed their material book or magazine objects. Using both new historicist and book studies methodologies, it exposes how these writers drew upon literary, ritual, and material practices of this culture, and how, in turn, this culture provided an interpretive framework for understanding such work. In its initial three chapters, which focus largely on Edgar Allan Poe, this dissertation revisits Poe's aesthetic philosophies ("The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition"), much of his most notable Gothic work (such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"), readers' responses to this work, and his own attempts or designs to mass-produce his personal script (in "A Chapter on Autography," "Anastatic Printing," and his cover for The Stylus) in order to revise our understanding of his relationship to this culture and its literary work, exposing a more sympathetic and less subversive relationship than is usually assumed. It illumines how Poe's aesthetic philosophies were aligned with those that undergird many of the contemporary mourning objects of the day, how his otherwise Gothic and macabre literature nevertheless served rather conventional and even recuperative ends by exposing the necessity of and inviting readers to participate in culturally sanctioned acts of mourning, and how he sought to confirm the harmony between his work and more conventional "consolation" or mourning literature by actively seeking to bring that work (and the "self" that produced it) visibly before his readership in a medium that this culture held was a reliable indicator of the nature and intent of both that work and its producer - namely his own personal script. In its latter three chapters, this dissertation illuminates Whitman's own extensive use of mourning and memorial conventions in his work, disclosing the way his 1855 Leaves of Grass relied, in both its literary and physical construction, upon the conventions of mourning and memorial literature, detailing the way his 1865 book of Civil War poetry Drum-Taps sought to unite a national body politic by creating a poetic and material text capable of allowing a grieving public readership to reconnect with and successfully mourn their dead, and how his 1876 Two Rivulets, overtly conceived of as a memorial volume, made use of the conventions associated with mourning and memorializing to bring readers to a more democratic understanding of "self" that Whitman believed would transform America into the democratic utopia it was destined to become. In revealing the way in which these authors' works reflect and reflect upon this culture, its ideologies, rituals, and practices, the dissertation also illumines an otherwise critically underexplored connection between these two writers. It details the influence of Poe's work on Whitman's poetic project, and borrows from Whitman's critical response to Poe in order to recast our understanding of Poe's literature in the manner detailed above. Thus, this dissertation offers new interpretations of some of the period's most canonical literature, alters our thinking about the relationship of these authors to each other and to nineteenth-century sentimental culture, and, finally, exposes a curious interdependence between Gothic and more transcendental literature that has implications not only for reading the work of Whitman and Poe, but for interpreting these literatures more generally.

Gothicism is the primary feature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction, and it is his skill in elevating Gothicism to the level of high art which makes him a great artist. Gothic elements are divided into six categories: Objects, Beings, Mental States, Practices and Actions, Architecture and Places, and Nature. Some devices from these six categories are documented in three of Hawthorne's stories ("Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil," and "Ethan Brown") and three of his romances (The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun). The identification of 142 instances of Hawthorne's use of Gothic elements in the above works demonstrates that Hawthorne is fundamentally a Gothic writer.

This thesis investigates how two novels by Dennis Cooper, Closer and Frisk, conceive of queer sexuality as transgressing heteronormative notions of moral standards, and how they challenge these by elevating their subject matters to an excessive degree. Drawing on the concepts of the grotesque and the Gothic, this thesis explores the aesthetics of Closer and Frisk, focusing in particular on the way corporeality figures as a central aspect of how these texts explore the ways in which the body becomes a site for Cooper’s discourses of transgression. Furthermore, drawing on Lee Edelman’s notion of the queer subject as inherently opposed to the value of every social form and structure, it is argued that the adverse representations of Cooper’s subjects work to add to this oppositionality. Thus, this thesis investigates how the queer expressions of desire in the texts are inextricable from the aberrant imagery of the body; the body as Gothically grotesque in the novels provides ways to configure alternative ways of conceptualizing the queer body and investigate its ties to transgression.

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Interview mit Alfred Pompe

Befragung von Szenemitgliedern

Der Artikel beleuchtet die Literaturszene der Gothic - Subkultur