Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-225). Also available on the Internet.

Orientador: Aparecido Donizete Rossi / Banca: Fernanda Aquino Sylvestre / Banca: Alcides Cardoso dos Santos / Resumo: A presente dissertação de mestrado pretende elucidar à luz de teorias feministas e do gênero gótico algumas técnicas de escrita utilizadas por Angela Carter na reescrita do conto de fadas "Chapeuzinho Vermelho", como forma de subversão de discursos patriarcais e desconstrução de todo um imaginário ocidental de subjugo e vitimização da mulher. Carter revisita os contos de fadas mais populares, na coletânea The Bloody Chamber and other stories, subvertendo padrões estruturais desses contos e também a posição da mulher como vítima passiva recorrente em alguns contos de fadas e na literatura gótica. Através dos contos "The Werewolf" e "The Company of Wolves" presentes na referida coletânea, pretende-se explorar como Carter faz uso de elementos do gótico para construir uma atmosfera de terror, que representa os perigos que a heroína terá que enfrentar para chegar ao final da trajetória e conquistar um prazer total (Jouissance), que ocorrerá através de sua independência econômica, social, sexual e imaginária. E como Carter propõe uma pornografia aliada à mulher, que a empodere e a ajude a descobrir sua identidade, para, assim, retomar seu lugar de igualdade com o homem na sociedade. Além disso, pretende-se elucidar, também, como a autora subverte o Gênero Gótico e os Contos de fadas, bem como a própria Pornografia e os discursos anti-pornografia do movimento feminista. / Abstract: This master's thesis aims to elucidate through feminist theories and the Gothic genre some writing techniques used by Angela Carter in the rewriting of the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" as a form of subversion of patriarchal discourses and deconstruction of an entire western imaginary subjugation and victimization of woman. Carter revisits the most popular fairy tales in the collection The Bloody Chamber and other stories, subverting structural patterns of these stories and also woman's position as recurring passive victim in some fairy tales and gothic literature. Through the tales "The Werewolf" and "The Company of Wolves", present in said collection, is intended to explore how Carter makes use of Gothic elements to build an atmosphere of terror, representing the dangers that the heroine will have to face to reach the end of the path and win a total pleasure (Jouissance), through its economic, social, sexual and imaginary independence. And how Carter proposes an ally pornography to woman, that empowers and helps her discover her identity, to thus repossess her place of equality with man in society. In addition, we intend to clarify, also, as the author subverts the Gender Gothic and Fairy tale, and the very Pornography and anti-pornography feminist movement speeches. / Mestre

Various characteristics of Gothic fiction are evident in Hawthorne's tales and romances - the interest in man's primitive self, the concern with historical and psychological facts and with imaginative and intuitive experience,' the delineation of the human conflict between spiritual aspirations and sensual needs, the emphasis on the ambiguity of good and evil as moral concepts, and the enactment of horror and terror. For Hawthorne these elements relate to the human struggle between mind and heart, between faith and passion - a struggle which is consonant with his own conflict with his Puritan conscience and his poetic imagination. They focus on the complexity of human feeling, yet help towards a final realization of man's significance and promise. They enable Hawthorne to resolve the eternal conflict between soul and body. The thesis deals with Hawthorne's four romances - The Scarlet letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun. In the first three, Hawthorne is hampered by his Puritan conscience so that passion is often subjugated by faith. In The Scarlet letter the persecution of .Hester and the ardent life she represents is at least justified in that it mirrors a historical truth. Moreover, Hawthorne achieves a certain ambivalence which, instead of signalling his own uncertainty and feebleness, enhances the complexity and mysteriousness of man's nature and situation. In The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, however, Puritan religiosity predominates and expresses itself in a wholly sentimental and repressive attitude. It is only in The Marble Faun that Hawthorne sees beyond the dilemma of man's dual aspects to realize the mythic and religious significance inherent in his seemingly divided self. While, in doing so, he manifests the typical Gothic idea that primitive man has a certain magnificence, Hawthorne is more interested in the fact that feeling is uplifting and ennobling. Human passion has a spiritual aspect.

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This thesis examines the portrayal of gentleman collectors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, arguing that they often find themselves challenged and destabilised by their collections. The collecting depicted contrasts revealingly with the Enlightenment practices of classification, taxonomy, and commodification, associated with the growth of both the public museum and the market economy. The dominance of such practices was bound up with the way they promoted subject-object relations that defined and empowered masculine identity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note that “[i]n the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty” (3). That being so, this study explores how the drive to classify and commodify the material world found oppositional, fictional form in gothicly inflected texts depicting a fascinating but frightening world of unknowable, alien objects and abject, emasculated subjects. The study draws upon Fred Botting’s contention that gothic extremes are a reaction to the “framework” of “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality and modes of production” (89). Examining novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Mary Ward, the thesis shows how gothicised instances of unproductive-masochism, pathological collecting, thwarted professionals, and emasculated heirs broke down the “framework” within which men and material culture were understood to interact productively and safely. Individual chapters dealing respectively with acquisition, possession, dissemination and inheritance, respond to the recent “material turn” in the humanities, bringing together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship to reveal the collector and the collection as the locus 3 for concerns with masculinity and materiality that preoccupied a turn-of-the-century mindset.

This doctoral thesis examines the role of animals in nineteenth-century science and Victorian Gothic fiction of the latter half of the century. It is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the interrelationship between science writings and literary prose and it seeks to place the Gothic animal body in its cultural and historical setting. This study is interested in the ways in which Gothic literature tests the limits of the human by using scientific ideas about disease, evolution, species confusion, and disability. In analysing the animal trope in Gothic scientific fiction, this thesis conceptualises the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in relation to, while setting itself apart from, contemporary scientific theories about humankind‘s place in the natural world. Chapter 1, 'Man‘s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog‘, focuses on the dog as an animal whose ability to carry and communicate deadly diseases to humans exemplified the breakdown of the animal-human boundary. I read late-nineteenth-century vampire and werewolf narratives as literary manifestations of social hysteria associated with dogs and rabies. In Chapter 2, 'Shaping Evolution: Amphibious Gothic in Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s The Coming Race and William Hope Hodgson‘s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, I examine the role of the frog in Victorian science as the background to Gothic fiction‘s portrayal of the Gothic body as an amphibious being. The next chapter explores the spider‘s function in Victorian natural history as the background to its role as a protean and unstable Gothic trope in fiction. Chapter four, 'Geological Underworlds: Mythologizing the Beast in Victorian Palaeontology‘, looks at ways in which the dinosaur in science influenced the literary imaginations of Gothic writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker. Under the title "Monsters Manufactured!": Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Victorian Gothic‘, the final chapter concludes the study with a discussion of freak culture, making key links between unusually-shaped people in society and human/animal hybrids in the Gothic fiction of H. G. Wells, Richard Marsh, and Wilkie Collins.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2002. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 255-269).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Michael Galchinsky, committee chair; Calvin Thomas, Lee Anne Richardson, committee members. Electronic text (181 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 7, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 174-181).

Thesis (M.A. in English)--Washington State University, August 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on mon. day, 2009). "Department of English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-79).