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.

Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate. The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth-century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers.

With his collected works, titled What About This, recently released, Frank Stanford has been resurrected in searing splendor. My thesis introduction will focus on Stanford’s first published collection, The Singing Knives. I chose The Singing Knives as the critical component to my thesis because of Stanford’s gritty presentation of poor-white Southern culture through his incorporation of Southern Gothic elements, such as the grotesque, and violent imagery often preoccupied with blood. With his penchant for the surreal, Stanford demonstrates a serious affinity for juxtaposition, particularly in his use of the grotesque and strange in proximity to the ordinary. What Stanford accomplishes so magnificently is the ability to make disconcerting and, at times, disturbing images beautiful and poignant. Along with juxtaposition, I will examine how Stanford uses anaphora and conceits toward the purpose of mythic narrative. I plan to follow this critical introduction with a minimum of forty pages of original poetry.

Of All That Is Seen and Unseen explores the concept the Southern literary identity and how that tradition is fading from modern literature while engaging in a dialogue with Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. However, it proposes that contemporary writers can recover Southern literary identity through three identifying elements of southern literature: family, land, and religion. The chapters focus on the tragic death of a beautiful, young girl and are told from different narrative perspectives. The genre is Southern Gothic and follows the Faulknerian model of creating a fictional place in Mississippi. The chapters are interrelated and feature reoccurring characters.

No description available.

Because works of Gothic fiction were often disregarded as sensationalist and unsophisticated, my aim in this thesis is to explore the ways in which these works actually drew attention to real societal issues and fears, particularly anxieties around Otherness and identity and gender construction. I illustrate how the context in which authors were writing specifically influenced the way they portrayed the supernatural in their narratives, and how the differences in their portrayals speak to the authors’ distinct aims and the issues that they address. Because the supernatural ultimately became internalized in the American Gothic, peculiarly within female bodies, I focus mainly on the relationship between the supernatural and the female characters in the texts I examine. Through this historical exploration of the transformation of the supernatural, I argue that the supernatural became internalized in the American Gothic because it reflected national anxieties: although freed from the external threat of the patriarchal English government, Americans of the young republic still faced the dangers of individualism and the failure of the endeavor to establish their own government.

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s role as the most significant precursor to the Gothic author in Britain, suggesting that Shakespeare used the same literary conventions that Gothic writers embraced as they struggled to create a new subgenre of the novel. By borrowing from Shakespeare’s canon, these novelists aimed to persuade readers and critics that rather than undermining the novel’s emergent, still unassured status as an acceptable literary genre, the nontraditional aspects of their works paid homage to Shakespeare’s imaginative vision. Gothic novelists thereby legitimized their attempts at literary expression. Despite these efforts, Gothic writers did not instantly achieve the type of acceptance or admiration that they sought. The Gothic novel has consistently been viewed as a monstrous, immature literary form—either a poor experiment in the history of the novel or a guilty pleasure for those who might choose to read or to write works that fit within this mode. Writers of Gothic fictions often claim that their works emulate Shakespeare’s dramatic pathos, but they do not acknowledge that the playwright also had to navigate similar opposition to his own creative expression. While early Gothic novelists had to contend with skeptical readers and reviewers, Shakespeare had to negotiate the religious, political, and ideological limitations that members of the court, the church, and the patronage system imposed upon his craft. Interestingly, Shakespeare often succeeded in circumventing these limitations by employing the literary techniques and topoi that we recognize today as trademarks of Gothic fiction—spectacle, sublime, sepulcher, and the supernatural. Each of these concepts expresses subversive intentions toward authoritative power. For Shakespeare and the Gothic novelists, the dramatic potential of these elements corresponds directly to their ability to target the sociocultural fears and anxieties of their audience; the results are works that frighten as well as amuse. As my dissertation will show, these authors use similar imagery to surreptitiously challenge the authority figures and institutions that sought to prescribe what makes a work of fiction socially acceptable or worthy of critical acclaim.

From early eighteenth-century literature to contemporary Gothic literature, the existence of Gothic conventions is evident. These Gothic conventions include family secrets, ruins or isolated mansions, hidden passageways, and bad weather. During an era when women were viewed as inferior and were expected to conform to the domestic expectations of their male counterparts, some female writers took it upon themselves to use their writing as a way to voice and illustrate the conditions that women endured. A thorough examination of Gothic Trappings in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Hannah Crafts’ The Bondswoman’s Narrative shows representations of various spaces that essentially confined women resulting in their silence. When analyzing the position of women during the nineteenth-century and the spaces that they were confined to, it becomes evident that the genre of Gothic literature serves as a device to challenge the restrictions placed on women in patriarchal society.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-270).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1992. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 260-274).