I created the term Neo-Raconteur to convey my interest in medium theory to support the artistic custom of revealing cultural conventions for allocation into artistic genres. The term evolved from the French word "Raconteur," meaning: somebody who tells stories or anecdotes in an interesting or entertaining way. In the past a Raconteur's anecdotes were verbally volleyed, ever voluble, yet quip. Neo-Raconteurs may decide not to speak at all choosing their anecdotal expression to manifest itself through singular or multiple means, manners, or methods of design and technology as well as or involving more traditional techniques of extraction to convey the narrative. I demonstrate how it applies to my work in time-based-media within the realms of Southern Gothic symbolism -- which rely on the supernatural, physical geographic settings, instances of the grotesque and irony along with visual and/or psychological shadow(s) of foreboding caused by tradition or hidden truths, occasionally both.

While some theorists have hinted at various social functions served by the gothic genre—such as providing an outlet for grief, anxiety, and violence in their various forms—recent research within the last few decades into sociology, military science, and trauma studies supplies compelling new ways of rereading the horror genre. In addition to providing an outlet for grief, anxiety, and violence in their various forms, horror media can now be read as a preemptive measure in an effort to mediate the immediate and long-term effects of the trauma and horror faced by humanity. I argue that in much the same way an author may write a self-help tract such as The Gift of Fear to try and inform women how to repel a sexual predator by graphically relating harrowing tales of sexual predation, so do some horror texts and film claim to preemptively mediate different types of trauma before, during, and after it occurs. This is done in each case not by merely scaring readers, but by inoculating them against them against future debilitating trauma before, during, and after it may occur. The relatively recent (or at least recently popularized) genre of self-help books that overtly seeks to prepare its audience for future trauma by exposing them to it in a controlled environment draws upon the canon of gothic literature for its inspiration as well as for its rhetorical strategies and literary devices. Without discounting the aesthetics and the utility of horror as a psychological outlet, I will show that gothic media can be reread and reconfigured within this new framework. By realigning horror studies within the framework of trauma studies and the possibility for inoculation against future trauma, this study will provide new insight into one how popular culture often portrays trauma through text, and I will seek to establish a new category affiliated with both trauma theory and horror, the study and representation of pre-memory. This thesis will also present as a case study the rhetorical self-inoculation of American horror author H.P. Lovecraft.

This thesis explores the development of the Gothic novel in England throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis establishes the Gothic as a literary mode of middle-class terror by analyzing Gothic novels within the historical context of the Industrial and Democratic revolutions. This requires an in-depth understanding of politics throughout both centuries and this thesis engages with several sources such as Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel which adds important context to my claims. Additionally, I use several contemporary sources such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the writings of Edmund Burke, and On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror by the Aikins. This thesis offers a method of tracking the Gothic as a consistently middle-class genre throughout history, and it ends with a chapter that questions the continued relevance of the Gothic as a middle-class genre in a world where the division of wealth is so skewed.

In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized conception of the witch and where a different prosopography of the historical witch emerges. Next, I will assess a short sample of nineteenth-century American pulp fiction to demonstrate the historical impact of America’s erotically decoded witch type on fictionalized versions or caricatures of the witch. In doing so I hope to create a reading that informs a more transatlantically complex representation of The Scarlet Letter. Finally, in order to underscore the significance of these national and historical departures of The Scarlet Letter as a gothic novel, I will contrast Hawthorne’s novel with a selective reading of nineteenth-century gothic texts from England and France that employ the witch or demonic feminine motif in an erotically codified and fantastic setting, namely using Old World magic and history that draws from French and English traditions.To demonstrate the significance of erotically coded witches in the British tradition, I will briefly examine Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” as a gothic text that relies heavily on the erotic affect encoded in the figure of Geraldine. I will also touch on Prosper Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille” and Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte Amoreuse,” two remarkable short stories that highlight the sublime terror of sexually deviant, occult female figures. Through such a collection of readings of witches and erotic, occult women I hope to amplify a more latent theme underlying The Scarlet Letter and America’s conflicted relationship with the gothic tradition: namely its crucial lack of erotic enchantment as a channel for the experience of gothic affect, the fantastic, and even sublime terror.

This study examines the theme of hybridity in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. Both the narrative text in the novel and the script with visual elements of the film use the concept of hybridity through Gothic motifs: a mad non-white woman in the attic in Jane Eyre and a psychological place in Get Out, where members of a white family hypnotise black people in order to exploit their physical capabilities. This is employed to disrupt dominant discourses of authoritative class, revealing the ways in which these discourses are constructed through the exclusion of certain identities. Bertha Mason, the Creole wife of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre, and Chris Washington, the African American protagonist of Get Out, both embody a sense of hybridity that challenges established norms of individuality and representation. Through a comparative analysis of these characters, this essay argues that hybridity serves as a means of exposing and subverting the power structures that reinforce presiding stereotypes of othered characters. By deconstructing these sovereign discourses, hybridity creates space for alternative voices and perspectives that are often excluded from ascendant literatures. Ultimately, this essay accentuates the importance of inspecting the intersectional identities of characters in literature and film, as a means of challenging prepotent discourses and promoting social justice.

The curriculum for Sweden’s upper secondary schools emphasises that specifically exclusion should be prevented, and that equality between all humans should permeate the education. This essay maintains that the post-colonial concept of othering, with help from Mary Shelley’s story about Frankenstein and his monster, could be used to educate upper secondary school students about these important matters. More specifically, the essay analyses how othering becomes concretised when Shelley’s original novel is used multimodally, through its graphic adaptation. The analysis shows that othering, through the discourses of racism and exoticism, becomes more visually palpable in the graphic novel. However, this also shines light on the importance to teach with ethical didactics, as othering otherwise could be reproduced. That is, the aim to make pupils more aware of how to prevent othering in real life could be inhibited if the didactic approach does not teach the students how to think constructively about the processes of othering. The study concludes that Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel could pose as a qualitative tool to teach about the importance of an inclusive world, if taught with ethical didactics. / <p>Slutgiltigt godkännandedatum: 2023-06-02</p>

This dissertation asks: what has happened to the children and grandchildren of former industrial workers, those who came of age in the shadow of industrial ruination in the Rust Belt? It draws on 105 interviews with working-class descendants who grew up in or near the Mon Valley in Pennsylvania, to explore how those descendants engage with industrial ruins. For most, the ruins recalled the breakdown of the employer-employee social contract, a sense of betrayed tradition, and the current (abysmal) state of affairs for the working class. Most advocate for the destruction of the ruins, as the loss and failure embodied by industrial ruination acts as a trap, imprisoning them in the past. Their attempts to build a new working-class identity require letting go of industrial work and the memories of the lost past. For a wider range of perspectives, two other groups of descendants were interviewed—fifteen arsonists and four cultural producers (novelists). The arsonists, who set fire to abandoned buildings, draw on regional fire symbolism and maintain their inherited association between work and identity as they struggle to resurrect industry. The novelists, who have all published in the vein of American Gothic literature, are seeking to reinterpret the past to serve the needs of the present, using supernatural figures alongside ruins in their novels in order to allow the main characters to identify, recover, and reinterpret a hidden past, which allows for mourning and the formulation of a new class identity. Each of these groups of descendants is cobbling together different versions of working-class identity, but all show that navigation of economic restructuring is a process of continual transformation. Descendants’ imaginative constructions are emblems not of solidity or permanence, but rather revision and reinvention.

Feminist scholars have focused on the Gothic as a medium for expressing the horrors of female experience in a patriarchal society. This study examines Gothic awareness in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic.The first part of the study focuses on Gothic awareness in relation to female sexuality and the threat of sexual violence from a feminist and psychoanalytic point of view.The second part of the analysis focuses on Gothic awareness in relation to domestic entrapment from a feminist point of view. In the third and final part of the study, Gothic awareness is analysed in relation to class and ethnicity from a Marxist and a postcolonial perspective. It is concluded that in Northanger Abbey, Catherine's lack of Gothic awareness stops her from becoming a victim, but also stops her from recognising the Gothic dangers surrounding her, whereas in Mexican Gothic, Noemí’s growing Gothic awareness enables her to take action against the Gothic dangers she faces. In both works, Gothic genre conventions are appropriated in order to convey the dangers faced by women in the worlds of the novels, but also subverted in order to show that women are more than passive victims.

Uppsatsens syfte är att studera hur Victoria Mas roman De galna kvinnornas bal (2022) anspelar på traditionen female gothic och motivet den galna kvinnan i en kontext av 1800-talets patriarkala strukturer. Romanen studeras därför i relation till Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) och Selma Lagerlöfs Spökhanden (1898), för att urskilja hur motivet den galna kvinnan har använts i 1800-talets klassiska gotiska litteratur, och om några signifikanta skillnader förekommer i Mas (2022) moderna roman. Den komparativa och intertextuella studien utförs med en kvalitativ textanalys som inbegriper närläsningar och tolkningar av materialet i syfte att tolka och förstå den galna kvinnans framställning och funktion. Yvonne Hirdmans teori om genussystem och genuskontrakt tillämpas för att analysera hur den galna kvinnan underordnas en manlig auktoritetsfigur, och vilka oönskade egenskaper som hon fångar upp. Slutsatserna visar framför allt hur den galna kvinnan i De galna kvinnornas bal (Mas 2022) fyller en samhällskritisk funktion, eftersom romanen med en samtida röst slagkraftigt kritiserar den manliga auktoritetsfiguren till skillnad från jämförelsematerialet. Den galna kvinnans oönskade egenskaper framställs heller inte som orimliga eller farliga, vilket särskiljer sig från Jane Eyre (Brontë 1847) där den galna kvinnan framställs med aggressiva och farliga egenskaper. En annan signifikant skillnad i Mas (2022) roman är att den galna kvinnan framställs som ett intressant forskningsobjekt att experimentera på och visa upp för allmänheten, till skillnad från de galna kvinnorna i 1800-talstexterna.

In this essay, the works Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice and Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu will be placed together and compared via close reading, and discussed alongside queer theory. The focus is to find similarities and contrast between these two vampiric tales as well as discuss how the queer element is shown. The main questions with this text will be; How is the queerness portrayed in the texts and what is the difference between them? There will also be a discussion about male versus female homosexuality and how this is portrayed in the texts. The point of this study is to show how similar grounds can culminate into different outcomes with the vampiric origin accounted for. The result showed a clear difference between the two texts, but also some similarities. The vampire stays queer in both.