The Victorians obsessed over the supernatural and this fascination with the otherworldly emerges in the literature of the day. With this thesis, I look at two nineteenth century novels that exhibit supernatural phenomena: Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). Both novels, I propose, utilize this aspect of the gothic tradition to enhance their characters' psychological realism. With Villette, I examine the supernatural as a fabricated experience. First, I study the protagonist's psyche and show how her emotional state directly contributes to the appearance of fantastic material. Specifically, I examine Lucy Snowe's childhood experiences in Bretton and then look at her continuing emotional isolation at the boarding school in Villette. I then illustrate how Lucy compensates for this loneliness by transforming the identities of her acquaintances and by often embellishing her own experiences. Following this, I examine her response to an external phenomenon, the ghostly nun. I argue that as Lucy discovers emotional fulfillment via her relationship with Paul Emanuel, she grows increasingly skeptical of the nun. This skepticism climaxes in a scene of violence, after which Lucy successfully denies the existence of the otherworldly. With Wuthering Heights, I examine the supernatural as a genuine phenomenon. To begin, I analyze two significant scenes which frame the main narrative: Lockwood's dream and Heathcliff's death. Both events, I subsequently demonstrate, are instances of supernatural interaction with the real world. Finally, I examine the spiritual and occult beliefs of the lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff. I then show how their ideology influences their decisions and, ultimately, brings about their reunion in the afterlife.

<p>The purpose of this dissertation is to chart the development of an ambivalent female identity in the Gothic genre, as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe&rsquo / s late eighteenth century fictions. The thesis examines the social and literary context of the emergence of the Gothic in English literature and argues that it is intimately tied up with changes in social, political and gender relations in the period.</p>

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of English, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

<p>The purpose of this dissertation is to chart the development of an ambivalent female identity in the Gothic genre, as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe&rsquo / s late eighteenth century fictions. The thesis examines the social and literary context of the emergence of the Gothic in English literature and argues that it is intimately tied up with changes in social, political and gender relations in the period.</p>

The embryonic ideas for this thesis began to form in two seminars I attended in 2000 while studying for a Masters at the University of Chicago. The first of these, W. J. T. Mitchell's 'Verbal and Visual Landscapes', must be given credit for introducing me to a short essay by Martin Heidegger entitled 'Die Kunst und der Raum' ('Art and Space'), which got me thinking about the 'special character' of space (Heidegger 1973: 4). In addition, Professor Mitchell's specific approach to landscape, that it should be considered as a verb rather than a noun, made me consider the ontological implications of the relationship between space and power that is witnessed both in and through landscape when approached as 'a process by which social and subjective identities are formed' (Mitchell 1994: 1).

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Eric Walker, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 7, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 43 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Magister Artium / The purpose of this dissertation is to chart the development of an ambivalent female identity in the Gothic genre, as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe's late eighteenth century fictions. The thesis examines the social and literary context of the emergence of the Gothic in English literature and argues that it is intimately tied up with changes in social, political and gender relations in the period. / South Africa

This thesis analyses the persistence of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs in the literature of Soviet Russia between 1920 and 1940. Nineteenth-century Russian literature was characterized by the almost universal assimilation of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs, adapted from the fiction of Western writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allen Poe. Writers from Pushkin to Dostoevskii, including the major Symbolists, wrote fiction combining the real with the macabre and supernatural. However, following the inauguration of the Soviet regime and the imposition of Socialist Realism as the official literary style in 1934, most critics assumed that the Gothic-fantastic had been expunged from Russian literature. In Konstantin Fedin's words, the Russian fantastic novel had "умер и закопан в могилу". This thesis argues that Fedin's dismissal was premature, and presents evidence that Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs continued to play a significant role in several genres of Soviet fiction, including science fiction, satire, comedy, adventure novels (prikliuchenskie romany), and seminal Socialist Realist classics. My dissertation identifies five categories of Gothic-fantastic themes, derived jointly from analysis of canonical Gothic novels from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and from innovative approaches to the genre made by contemporary critics such as Fred Botting, Kelly Hurley, Diane Hoeveler, Elaine Showalter and Eric Naiman (whose book Sex in Public coined the phrase 'NEP Gothic'). Each chapter analyses one of these five Gothic themes or tropes in the context of selected Soviet Russian literary texts. The chronotope of Gothic space, epitomized in the genre as the haunted castle or house, is readdressed by Mikhail Bulgakov as the 'nekhoroshaia kvartira' of Master i Margarita and by Evgenii Zamiatin as the 'drevnyi dom' of his dystopian fantasy My. Gothic gender issues, including the subgenre of Female Gothic, arise in Nikolai Ognev's novels and Aleksandra Kollontai's stories. The Gothic obsession with dying, corpses and the afterlife re-emerges in fictions such as Daniil Kharms' 'Starukha' (whose hero is threatened by an animated corpse) and Nikolai Erdman's banned play Samoubiitsa (the story of a failed suicide). Gothic bodies (deformed or regressive human bodies) are contrasted with Stalinist cultural aspirations to somatic perfection within a utopian society. Typically Gothic monsters - vampires, ghosts, and demon lovers - are evaluated in a separate chapter. Each Gothic trope is integrated with my analysis of the relevant Soviet discourse, including early Communist attitudes to gender and the body and the philosopher Nikolai Federov's utopian belief in the possibility of universal resurrection. As my focus is thematic rather than author-centred, my field of research ranges from well-known writers (Fedor Gladkov, Bulgakov, Zamiatin) to virtual unknowns (Grigorii Grebnev and Vsevolod Valiusinskii, both early 1930s novelists), and recently rediscovered writers (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, Vladimir Zazubrin). Three Soviet authors who explicitly emulated the nineteenth-century Gothic-fantastic tradition in their fiction were Mikhail Bulgakov, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and A.V. Chaianov. Many mainstream Soviet writers also exploited Gothic-fantastic motifs in their work. Fedor Gladkov's Socialist Realist production novel, Tsement, uses the trope of the Gothic castle to dramatise the reclamation of a derelict cement factory by the workers. Nikolai Ognev's Dnevnik Kosti Riabtseva, the diary of an imaginary Communist schoolboy, relies on ghost stories to sustain suspense. Aleksandr Beliaev, the popular science fiction writer, inserted subversive clich's from the Gothic narrative tradition in his deceptively optimistic novels. Gothic-fantastic tropes and motifs were used polemically by dissident writers to subvert the monologic message of Socialist Realism; other writers, such as Gladkov and Marietta Shaginian, exploited the same material to support Communism and attack Russia's enemies. The visceral resonance of Gothic fear lends its metaphors unique political impact. This dissertation aims at an overall survey of Gothic-fantastic narrative elements in early Soviet literature rather than a conclusive analysis of their political significance. However, in conclusion, I speculate that the survival of the Gothic-fantastic genre in the hostile soil of the Stalinist literary apparatus proves that early Soviet literature was more varied, contradictory and self-interrogative than previously assumed.

Thesis advisor: Christy Pottroff / Thesis advisor: Paul Lewis / In 1822 the Western world experienced a revolution in literature and archaeology when the Rosetta Stone was successfully translated, and a craze coined Egyptomania took over the Western world. American literature—ranging from newspaper articles, travel narratives, short fiction, and books concerning ethnology and race science—became inundated with discussion of the material culture of ancient Egypt. As authors interacted with the material culture, they began to question who the ancient Egyptians were and how they managed to create such monuments. Many American authors struggled to comprehend how such ancient people were so advanced in methods of art and engineering, thus thwarting the current nineteenth-century ideals of progress. Especially among white Americans, there was anxiety that the ancient Egyptians were not European, leading to an overall fear of Oriental superiority. My aim here is not to explore the effects of Egyptomania in general on American culture, but rather to analyze how specific artifacts, monuments, and mummies were received and adapted by nineteenth-century authors. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

Following the growth of criticism related to Cormac McCarthy, this study examines the author's early works in such a way that treats the different novels as a group, deriving a worldview that functions for McCarthy's works when viewed together, as opposed to treating each novel separately as has been the only previous mode of criticism for this award-winning author. Specifically, the study examines three main themes of the first five novels in McCarthy's oeuvre: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. In order, the themes are ontological equality, survival of "ruder forms," and time as it relates to permanence and transience. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's texts regarding the concepts of rationality, morality, war, and philosophy itself greatly inform parts of this study, especially relating to the fifth novel, Blood Meridian. Nietzsche's notion of rationality and morality (pre-revaluation) as inimical to survival ( and his conception of war, albeit as a metaphor) directly corresponds to how McCarthy's universe functions as constructed by the characters and action of the novels.