In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainlypositioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.

This dissertation contends with the diverse corpus of Gothic ivory grooming implements carved in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Employing feminist, queer, posthumanist, and ecocritical methodologies, it explores these objects as tools in gender and identity formation. Attending to the complexity of medieval attitudes to grooming and women and to the polysemy of these objects’ iconographies, this dissertation argues for the inherent ambiguity of the bodies that constitute and were constituted by these tools. It participates in a broader project of revealing the inherent ambiguity of medieval gender and its deep enmeshment with the nonhuman animal world by presenting ivory beauty implements as nexuses of excess and resistance to feminine ideals. Calling attention to the body of the elephant as the source of the grooming tools’ materiality, its analysis demonstrates how the subjugation of the nonhuman animal reverberates through objects created to give order to human animal bodies, in particular the bestial female body. The material, iconographical, functional, and textual strands wound together in ivory grooming tools reveal the women of flesh and ivory to be far more multilayered and subversive, resourceful and complex, than scholarship has hitherto recognized. At once tools of subjugation and instruments to assert agency, in the hands of their users, ivory grooming tools become sites of identity expression and self-transformation.

This essay explores monstrosity in two contemporary horror stories: “The Whistlers” by Amity Argot, and “Whitefall” by C.K. Walker, focusing on how the humans in these texts are monstrously transformed. The monsters and monstrosity present in the texts are read against some of the cultural anxieties of postmodernity, and against various monstrous frameworks such as that of the zombie, the terrorist, and the monstrous space and nature. Both texts present monstrous spaces intent on perverting humans by eroding them physically until they reach a state of bare life that mimics zombification and may allegorize socioeconomic inequality, displacement, and the effects of capitalism; as well as by enticing them to commit atrocities against each other and transgress the very moral boundaries that defined them as human, up to and including cannibalism. In this way, these monsters reveal humans as their own annihilators, laying bare an innate human monstrosity that emerges from the traumatic conditions of postmodernity.

In this thesis I analyzed three different literary works; A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers (2020), Bunny by Mona Awad (2019), and Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi (1991) through the perspective of the female killer. The aim of the thesis was to analyze the so called “female rage” and what led the women in these novels to murder men. I also discussed how the female killers were presented and if and how the women were perceived as monstrous. The method I chose to do this was close reading, and the theory I used was queer theory. I mostly used Jack Halberstam’s book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters to contextualize my arguments as well as Judith Butler’s Genustrubbel and Sam Holmqvist’s chapter in Litteraturvetenskap II. The analysis showed that there is a connection between the monster and queerness, and that each of the women I wrote about has both monstrous and queer aspects. The analysis also showed the importance of power and how most of the motivation behind the women killing the men was their lack of power in a patriarchal society.

Ireland is not a country unfamiliar with trauma. It is an island widely known for its history with Vikings, famine, and as a colony of the English empire. Inevitably, then, these traumas surface in the literature from the nation. Much of the literature that was produced, especially after the decline in the Irish language after the Great Famine of the 1840s, focused on national identity. In the nineteenth century, there was a growing movement for Irish cultural identity, illustrated by authors John Millington Synge and William Butler Yeats; this movement was identified as the Gaelic Revival. Another movement in literature began in the nineteenth century and it reflected the social and political anxieties of the Anglo-Irish middle class in Ireland. This movement is the beginning of the Gothic genre in Irish literature. Dominated by authors such as Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, Gothic novels used aspects of the sublime and the uncanny to express the fears and apprehensions that existed in Anglo-Irish identity in the nineteenth century. My goal in writing this thesis is to examine Gothic aspects of contemporary Irish fiction in order to address the anxieties of Irish identity after the Irish War of Independence that began in 1919 and the resulting division of Ireland into two countries. I will be examining Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, and Anna Burns' No Bones in order to evaluate their use of children amidst the trouble surrounding the formation of identity, both personal and national, in Northern Ireland. All three novels use gothic elements in order to produce an atmosphere of the uncanny (Freud); this effect is used to enlighten the theme of arrested development in national identity through the children protagonists, who are inescapably haunted by Ireland's repressed traumatic history.; Specifically, I will be focusing on the use of ghosts, violence, and hauntings to illuminate the social anxieties felt by Northern Ireland after the Irish War of Independence.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.