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.

Adolescence – that tricky time when children have not yet reached adulthood – is a time of much disturbance, change and growth. Faced with a body that changes, stretches and grows in all directions, as does the mind, the adolescent finds that they are not who they once were, and that their concerns are not what they once were. According to David Punter, the nature of adolescence is integral to Gothic writing; for him, adolescence can be seen as a time when there is a fantasised inversion of boundaries: ‘where what is inside finds itself outside (acne, menstrual blood, rage) and what we think should be visibly outside (heroic dreams, attractiveness, sexual organs) remain resolutely inside and hidden’ (Punter 1998, 6). However, this is to ‘Gothicise’ adolescents - to view adolescents themselves as Gothic beings – rather than to understand what the true nature of their concerns and fears really are. This thesis intends to investigate, therefore, those fears and concerns as they are represented through the medium of Gothic texts written for adolescents. I propose to examine what happens to the Gothic mode in the gap between young children’s literature and adult fiction and will look at, through the Gothic lens, Young Adult literature which explores the teenager's relationships with issues such as sex, death and autonomy. As the Gothic is ‘erotic at root’ (Punter 1996, 191) and often focused on the centrality of sexuality, I explore the nature of ‘changing bodies’ and consider the adolescent’s burgeoning sexuality and desire for romantic relationships; however, the Gothic is not just about sex, and I also examine adolescent engagement with the concept of death, before finally going on to study issues of adolescent power and autonomy.

In both Outer Dark and Child of God, McCarthy does a masterful job of blending the elements of Appalachian Gothic to present a novel that is darkly suspenseful and grimly thought-provoking. Outer Dark focuses on the complex incestuous relationship between a brother and sister and their interaction with others. The novel follows the two on a journey through the wilderness where they must cope with the unknown qualities of that wilderness, as well as the guilt stemming from their own behaviors. In Child of God, McCarthy explores the grotesque nature of a life lived in isolation and poverty in the mountains. This novel focuses more on an individual descent into the gruesome depths that illustrate the main character’s depravity. In these two novels McCarthy examines the darker side of life in Appalachia, and forces readers to question the purpose and meaning for the characters’ lives and actions.

Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression. Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others. I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation, focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text "speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1970) and The Adaptable Man (1965) address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual rgime that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference. The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman)

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1996. / Typescript. Bibliography: leaves 136-139. Also available online.

Orientador: Mário Luiz Frungillo / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-24T10:22:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Saber_RogerioLobo_M.pdf: 1131901 bytes, checksum: bd74a40c9603c7d7c7f65986303efd81 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: As obras Crônica da casa assassinada e O morro dos ventos uivantes - escritas, respectivamente, pelos autores Lúcio Cardoso (1912-1968) e Emily Brontë (1818-1848) - podem ser lidas como textos que, além de explorarem elementos da estética gótica literária, partilham uma trama que se movimenta a partir dos planos de vingança executados por seus protagonistas Nina e Heathcliff. Em primeiro lugar, desejamos delimitar quais elementos e temas são explorados pelos textos que nos permitem compará-los com os romances pertencentes à literatura noir dos séculos XVIII e XIX. Por fim, prevemos a aproximação de ambos os romances, de maneira que possamos compreender as razões da vingança de cada um dos agentes, os instrumentos utilizados, o modo de execução do plano e, por fim, as consequências do ataque levado a cabo. A aproximação proposta, além de confirmar que os textos podem ser lidos como obras góticas, indica-nos conclusões de ordem filosófica a respeito do tema em estudo (vingança) / Abstract: The literary works Crônica da casa assassinada and Wuthering Heights - respectively written by Lúcio Cardoso (1912-1968) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848) - can be read as texts that explore elements from the literary gothic aesthetics as well as a plot that animates itself through the revenge plan executed by their protagonists Nina and Heathcliff. In the first place, we want to delineate the elements and themes that are explored in the texts and that allow us to compare them to the novels that belong to the 18th and 19th centuries literature noir. In conclusion, we foresee an approximative reading of both novels in order to understand the reasons of the revenge of each protagonist, the instruments used, how the plan was executed and, finally, the consequences of the attack. Our approximative reading confirms that the texts can be read as gothic novels and it indicates us philosophical conclusions on the elected theme (revenge) / Mestrado / Teoria e Critica Literaria / Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

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This dissertation explores vampire logic in Hispanic short fiction of the last decade of the 19th century and first three decades of the 20th century, and is thus a comparative study; not simply between Spanish and Latin American literary production, but also between Hispanic and European literary traditions. As such, this study not only draws attention to how Hispanic authors employed traditional Gothic conventions—and by extension, how Hispanic nations produced “modern” literature—but also to how these authors adapted previous models and therefore deviated from and questioned the European Gothic tradition, and accordingly, established trends and traditions of their own. This study does not pretend to be exhaustive. Even though I mention poetry, plays, and novels from the first appearance of the literary vampire in the mid-18th century through the fin de siglo and the first few decades of the 20th century, I focus on short fiction produced within and shortly thereafter the fin de siglo, as this time period saw a resurgence of the vampire figure on a global scale and the first legitimate appearance in Hispanic letters, being as it coincided with a rise in periodicals and short story production and represented developments and anxieties related to the physical and behavioral sciences, technological advances and urban development, waves of immigration and disease, and war. While Chapter 1 establishes a working theory of the vampire from a historical and materialist perspective, each of the following chapters explores a different trend in Hispanic vampire literature: Chapter 2 looks at how vampire narratives represent political and economic anxieties particular to Spain and Latin America; Chapter 3 studies newly married couples and how vampire logic leads to the death of the wife—and thus the death of the “angel of the house” ideal—therefore challenging ideas surrounding marriage, the family, and the home; lastly, Chapter 4 explores courting couples and how disruptions in the makeup of the public/private divide influenced images of female monstrosity—complex, parodic ones in the Hispanic case. One of the main conclusions this study reaches is that Hispanic authors were indeed producing Gothic images, but that these images deviated from the European Gothic vampire literary tradition and prevailing literary tendencies of the time through aesthetic and narrative experimentation and as a result of particular anxieties related to their histories, developments, and current realities. While Latin America and Spain produced few explicit, Dracula-like vampires, the vampire figures, metaphors, and allegories discussed in the chapters speak to Spain and Latin America’s political, economic, and ideological uncertainties, and as a result, their “place” within the modern global landscape. This dissertation ultimately suggests that Hispanic Gothic representations are unique because they were being produced within peripheral spaces, places considered “non-modern” because of their distinct histories of exploitation and development and their distinct cultural, religious, and racial compositions, therefore shifting perceptions of Otherness and turning the Gothic on its head. The vampire in the Hispanic context, I suggest, is a fusion of different literary currents, such as Romanticism, aesthetic movements, such as Decadence, and modes, such as the Gothic and the Fantastic, and is therefore different in many ways from its predecessors. These texts abound with complex representations that challenge the status quo, question dominant narratives, parody literary formulas, and break with tradition. / Spanish

Le cinéma de Tim Burton se reconnaît par des codes thématiques et des images si aisément identifiables que le nom du cinéaste a donné naissance à l’adjectif « burtonien ». Que signifie au juste ce qualificatif ? Cette thèse se propose de démontrer que si la signature de Tim Burton est reconnaissable entre toutes, c’est qu’elle porte l’héritage des gothiques littéraire et cinématographique. Burton s’en empare pour les transformer, adoptant une double stratégie d’adhésion et d’inversion des tropes du genre. Afin de définir ce gothique burtonien, nous étudions dans un premier temps le croisement entre l’humain et le monstrueux, un questionnement directement hérité du Frankenstein de Mary Shelley et de son adaptation éponyme par James Whale en 1931. Nous analysons ensuite la géographie de l’espace burtonien et sa représentation d’une société cruelle et machinique dont les personnages doivent s’extraire pour survivre. L’art émerge comme un moyen de survie ambivalent qui nous mène à considérer la création artistique du cinéaste lui-même, bâtie comme les grandes œuvres gothiques sur un brouillage des frontières, entre la vie et la mort, le passé et le présent, le rêve et la réalité. / The films of Tim Burton can easily be recognized by their thematic codes and identifiable images so much so that the director’s very name has given birth to the adjective “Burtonian”. But what does it qualify exactly? This dissertation proposes to demonstrate that Burton’s signature is particularly recognizable because it inherits from gothic literature and film. Burton tackles and transforms gothic tropes using a double strategy of adherence and reversal. To define what we call the “Burtonian gothic”, we first study the crossing between the humane and the monstrous, an issue directly inherited from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its film adaptation by James Whale in 1931. We analyze then the geography of the Burtonian landscape and its representation of a cruel and mechanical society from which the characters must escape to survive. Art emerges as an ambivalent means of survival which leads us to consider the artistic creation of the filmmaker himself, built like great gothic works on blurred frontiers, between life and death, past and present, dream and reality.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A tese se insere nos estudos sobre o gótico literário. Seu objetivo principal é mostrar o lar como lugar crucial para o desenvolvimento das temáticas caras ao gênero, destacando o corpo feminino como pivô. Na primeira parte, foram analisados estudos teóricos sobre o romance inglês, apontando para uma possível mudança na maneira como o gótico vem sendo tratado. Na segunda parte, obras ficcionais importantes para a discussão do lar e do corpo feminino dentro da tradição gótica foram analisadas, promovendo a articulação de tais obras com as diretrizes teóricas pertinentes. Finalmente, a terceira e última parte terá os romances Ciranda de Pedra, Daughters of the House e Lady Oracle como foco, a fim de apontar o modo como a narrativa gótica contemporânea assimilou as questões tratadas anteriormente / The present work is a study about the literary Gothic. Its main objective is to show the house as a crucial place for the development of themes related to the Gothic, highlighting the female body as a central figure. In the first part, theoretical studies related to the English novel are analyzed and a possible shift in the way the Gothic is dealt with is described. In the second part, relevant fictional works for the discussion of the house and of the female body in the Gothic tradition are analyzed in dialogue with pertinent theoretical ideas. Finally, the third and last part brings forth the novels Ciranda de Pedra, Daughters of the House and Lady Oracle in order to show how contemporary Gothic fiction deals with the issues previously discussed