published_or_final_version / abstract / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis examines the way in which four women writers of the 1790s appropriated the architectural metaphors of the Revolution debate in their Gothic novels. By transforming the political metaphor of the Gothic building into a material environment in their writing, this thesis argues that Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, and Jane Austen staked their own variant positions in contemporary debates regarding revolution and reform. In the 1790s, the more general struggle for political and social improvement was linked by writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft to the need for reform of sexual inequality in society. By closely examining the Gothic building – typically a hostile environment for its female inhabitants – this thesis argues that the Gothic house or castle functions in these novels as a critique of domestic, as well as state, politics. Chapter one begins by exploring the synergies between architecture, politics, and the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. In this way, this thesis contributes to a neglected yet emerging area of Gothic scholarship: the complex and symbiotic relationship between architecture and the Gothic novel. Chapter two considers the way in which Charlotte Smith exploits contemporary associations of Gothic architecture in The Old Manor House (1793) to subvert the political ideology embedded in the architectural metaphors of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In chapters three and four, the architectural descriptions of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Robinson are read in dialogue with those of Edmund Burke, Hannah More, John Thelwall, and Mary Wollstonecraft: in Radcliffe and Robinson's novels, this thesis argues, the simple structure of revolutionary reform is favoured over the ancient castle of counter-revolutionary custom. Finally, chapter five challenges the critical conception of Jane Austen as a political reactionary by examining the way in which her depiction of architecture in Northanger Abbey (1817) destabilises the most perniciously gendered aspects of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 355-368). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99204

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

The purpose of this project is to establish the connections between southern women writers, autotheory, and grotesque descriptions of disability in Gothic Literature as a significant subset of literature. Southern women writers transform their bodily experiences through the language of the grotesque in testimony to re-create a life that has been unmade by pain. Their autobiographical narratives serve as an expression for the inexpressible, affirm their experiences for themselves, and call upon others to join in witnessing their impact. The introduction uses prominent theories from various critical fields to establish a new theory, and the following chapters reflect on that theory from the lives and literature of three disabled southern women writers: Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Zelda Fitzgerald. As demonstrated in these women’s lives and literature, in a society which others odd, obscure experiences, using the testimonial voice is necessary to the personal and social survival of disability. Writing offers the opportunity for disabled people to make a permanent impact by creating from the knowledge of personal suffering to impact the world and its perceptions surrounding life with disability. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis addresses the central role of the haunted house in mid-to-late Victorian Gothic texts. It argues that haunting in fiction derives from distinct architectural and spatial traits that the middle-class Victorian home possessed. These design qualities both reflected and reinforced current social norms, and anxiety about the latter surfaced in Gothic texts. In this interdisciplinary study, literary analysis works alongside spatial examination, under the premise that literature is a space that can be penetrated and deciphered in the same way that buildings are texts that can be read and interpreted. This work is divided into two main sections, with the first three chapters introducing theoretical, historical and architectural notions that provide a background to the literary works to be discussed. The first chapter presents various theorists’ notions behind haunting and the convergence of spectrality and space, giving rise to the discussion of domestic haunting and its appeal. The second chapter examines the Crystal Palace as the icon of public space in Victorian times, its capacity for haunting, as well as its ability to frame the domestic both socially and historically. The third chapter focuses on the prototype of private space at the time—the middle-class home—in order to highlight the specificity of this dwelling, both as an architectural and symbolic entity. The second section also consists of three chapters, dedicated to the “dissection” of the haunted house, divided into three different areas: liminal, secret, and surrounding space. The fourth chapter examines works where marginal space, in the shape of hallways and staircases, is the site of intense haunting. A novel by Richard Marsh and stories by Bulwer-Lytton, Algernon Blackwood and W.W. Jacobs are analyzed here. The fifth chapter is a journey through rooms and secretive space of the spectral home; works by authors such as Wilkie Collins, J.H. Riddell and Sheridan Le Fanu are considered in order to argue that the home’s exceptional compartmentalization and its concern for secrecy translated effortlessly into Gothic fiction. The final chapter addresses an integral yet external part of the Victorian home—the grounds. Gardens in works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, M.R. James, and Oscar Wilde are inspected, proving Gothic fiction’s disregard for boundaries and its ability to exceed the parameters of the home.

This dissertation considers the future convergence between gothic studies and humanism in the age of posthumanism and proposes “cyborgothic” as a new literary genre that heralds that future. The convergence under consideration is already in progress in that an encounter between human and non-human consistently inspires the two fields, questioning the nature of humans and the treatment of such non-human beings as cyborgs. Such questioning, often conducted within the boundary of humanities, persistently interprets non-human beings as either representing or helping human shortcomings. Accordingly, answers are human-orientated or even human-centered in many cases, and “cyborgothic,” generated out of retrospective investigation into gothic studies and prospective formulation of posthumanism, aims to present different, nonanthropocentric ways to view humans and non-humans on equal terms. The retrospective investigation into gothic studies focuses on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful to retrieve a gothic aesthetics of the beautiful, and in the second chapter, examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein against Kant’s aesthetics to demonstrate how this gothic aesthetics becomes obsolete in the tradition of the sublime. This dissertation then addresses Bram Stoker’s Dracula along with Bruno Latour’s Science in Action to reveal problems in fabricating scientific knowledge, especially focusing on sacrifices made in the process. In the forth chapter, I examine Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith with William James’s pragmatism, and consider the question of how moral complications inherent in science have been handled in American society. The last chapter proposes Marge Piercy’s He, She and It as a same cyborgothic text, which tries to develop a way to acknowledge the presence of the cyborg—one that is at once aesthetical and ethical—so as to enable humans and cyborgs to relate each other on equal terms. Thus, “cyborgothic” is being required as a literary attempt to present the age of posthumanism that is no longer anthropocentric.

Cyberpunk's attempt to imagine the futures that the expanding communications networks will shape, as explored in Sterling's Islands in the Net and Stephenson's The Diamond Age, discovers that the boundaries between the machine and human, the natural and artificial, and the past and present have never been as clear as the modern realist schematic has drawn them. Gothic literature represents transgressions of these boundaries as threatening to the self, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the node where the gothic is dismembered and sutured into science fiction, and the modern self faces its monstrous double. Yet if boundaries are represented as sites of interface, gothic threats become opportunities for growth and generation. Individual texts, even realist ones, have always sutured together intertextual ingredients. Jane Eyre offers an alternative model for constructing the subject through sorting texts, a technique which emerges through cyberpunk as the essential survival skill of the future self.

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