Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1967. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-298).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 286-304).

This thesis is intended to document and explain the peculiarly high incidence of monsters in English children's literature, where monsters are understood in the term's full etymological sense as things which demonstrate through disturbance. In this context, monsters are frequently young people themselves; the youthful protagonists of children's literature. Their demonstrative operation typically functions not only as an overt or covert tool by which to educate children's literature's implied child audience, but also as a wider indicator - demonstrator - of adult appreciations of and arguments over children and how children should be permitted to grow. In this latter role especially, children are rendered truly monstrous as alienated and problematic tokens in adult cultural arguments. They can fast become such efficient demonstrators of adult crises that their very presence engenders all the notions of unacceptability with which monsters are characteristically associated. The chronological range of this thesis' study is the eighteenth-century to the present. From this period, the following children's authors, children's books, and series of children's books have been examined in detail: • Thomas Day: Sandford and Merton • Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose for Children • Sarah Trimmer: Fabulous Histories • Mary Martha Sherwood: The Fairchild Family • Charles Kingsley: The Water-Babies • Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass • George MacDonald: At the Back of the North Wind • J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan, and Peter and Wendy • C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Last Battle) • J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter {The Philosopher's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, and The Half-Blood Prince). The theoretical notions of monsters and monstrosity that are used to discuss these texts draw principally on the writings on the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the uncanny by Sigmund Freud, and the fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov.

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which monstrosity is articulated in fantastic literature, a genre or mode that is inherently devoted to the challenge of representing the unrepresentable. Through the readings of a number of nineteenth-century texts and the analysis of the fiction of two twentieth-century writers (H. P. Lovecraft and Tommaso Landolfi), I show how the intersection of the monstrous theme with the fantastic literary mode forces us to consider how a third term, that of language, intervenes in many guises in the negotiation of the relationship between humanity and monstrosity. I argue that fantastic texts engage with monstrosity as a linguistic problem, using it to explore the limits of discourse and constructing through it a specific language for the indescribable. The monster is framed as a bizarre, uninterpretable sign, whose disruptive presence in the text hints towards a critique of overconfident rational constructions of ‘reality’ and the self. The dissertation is divided into three main sections. The first reconstructs the critical debate surrounding fantastic literature – a decades-long effort of definition modeling the same tension staged by the literary fantastic; the second offers a focused reading of three short stories from the second half of the nineteenth century (“What Was It?,” 1859, by Fitz-James O’Brien, the second version of “Le Horla,” 1887, by Guy de Maupassant, and “The Damned Thing,” 1893, by Ambrose Bierce) in light of the organizing principle of apophasis; the last section investigates the notion of monstrous language in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and Tommaso Landolfi.

The focus of this thesis is the examination of whiteness as a dominant identity and subject position. Whiteness has conventionally assumed a normative, monolithic status as the template of humanity. Recent theorising has attempted to specify and denaturalise whiteness. In order to participate in this fracturing of whiteness, I analyse examples in which it functions as a site of contested and ambiguous contradiction. To this end, I use contemporary monstrosity to examine whiteness. Monstrosity is a malleable and culturally specific category of difference that measures alterity, and by displaying discursive functions in an extreme form offers insight into the ways in which deviance and normativity operate. I argue that the conjunction of whiteness and monstrosity, through displaying whiteness in a negative register, depicts some of the discursive operations that enable whiteness to attain such hegemonic dominance. I deploy theories of marginalisation and subjectivation drawn from a variety of feminist, critical race, and philosophical perspectives in order to further an understanding of the discursive operations of hegemonic and normative subject positions. I offer a brief history and overview of both the history and prior conceptualisations of monstrosity and whiteness, and then focus on two particular examples of contemporary white monstrosity. I closely examine the representation of monstrosity in serial killer films. The figure of the serial killer is typically a white, heterosexual, middle class male whose monstrosity is implicitly reliant upon these elements. In my discussion of the recent phenomenon of fatal shootings at high schools in North America, I investigate the way the massacre at Columbine High School functions as the public face of the phenomenon and for the unique interest it generated in the mass media. I focus on a Time magazine cover that featured a photograph of the adolescent perpetrators under the heading The Monsters Next Door, which condensed and emblematised the tension that they generated. It is through the perpetrators uneasy occupation of dual subject positions???namely the unassuming all American boy and the contemporary face of evil???that their simultaneous representation as average and alien undermines the notion of whiteness as neutral and invisible.

Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues' Le musee noir is a collection of short stories insidiously permeated by the monster figure in its most diverse forms. Far from being reduced to a simple thematic function, this omnipresence of the monstrous contributes to making the collection truly a whole by instilling it with an internal mode of operation. This rhetoric of the monstrous directs both the collection and each of the stories, all the while driving their dynamic of the fantastic. / The mandiarguian text acquires its fantastic dimension through a progressive transformation of the protagonist's point of view, inciting him to perceive his environment as a gigantic monstrous entity. Contact with this entity causes the protagonist's own personality to be replaced by that of the monster. Yet it is the woman who, as a representative of the sacred in the logic of fantastic stories, remains in Mandiargues' text the best incarnation of the monstrous figure. Man, who represents the profane, will emerge contaminated by the sacred from his encounter with the monstrous and devouring woman. This contagion is incarnated by the androgynous figure, which remains most convincingly represented within this work by the negro. Finally, by comparing Mandiargues' writing devices with the techniques used in horror museums of old for monsters stage exhibitions, we will be able to confirm our initial hypothesis: the monster figure, by being the motor of the fantastic element dynamic, is essential to the unity of the collection. / The second part of this work in literary creation is a collection of fantastic short stories, all of which feature the same troubling presence. This presence possesses several characteristics of the monster figure, as seen in the work of Mandiargues.

The Sentimental/Gothic myth, which dominates much of English and American literature during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, represents a cultural attempt to achieve unity, but the attempt is foredoomed because the essence of the myth is division. The myth's metaphor is sexual. The division that forms the acknowledged basis of the myth is that between two modes of being, seen as sexual modes: masculinity (power, aggression, violence, energy, dominance, etc.) and femininity (attraction, passivity, submissiveness, etc.). The unity sought by the myth on its acknowledged level is domestic harmony, the infusion of masculine strength into feminine passivity, the taming of masculine power by feminine submissiveness. Thus the myth regardsmarriage as the perfect state and the family as the perfect model of cultural unity. But the myth itself is flawed by a further division, of which the masculine/feminine division is actually a reflection: this is a division of the conscious, Sentimental myth from the largely unconscious Gothic myth. The Gothic, reversing the acknowledged direction of the myth (or carrying it full-circle to its inevitable conclusion), seeks the destruction of femininity by masculinity, the throwing off of feminine submissiveness by masculine violence. Thus it regards death(the "marriage" of murderer and victim) as the perfect state, and sterility, the blasted family, as the perfect model of unity.Mary Shelley's Frankenstein reflects both mythic divisions and their close interrelationship. Its hero seeks to establish his Sentimental masculinity and to achieve domestic unity, but in doing so creates the Gothic Monster who destroys the creator's beloved, his family, and finally drains life from the hero himself. Frankenstein, in form, themes, and characterization, reflects the ironies by which the Sentimental/Gothic myth is divided against itself, and shows the tragic consequences of its divisions.

The focus of this thesis is the examination of whiteness as a dominant identity and subject position. Whiteness has conventionally assumed a normative, monolithic status as the template of humanity. Recent theorising has attempted to specify and denaturalise whiteness. In order to participate in this fracturing of whiteness, I analyse examples in which it functions as a site of contested and ambiguous contradiction. To this end, I use contemporary monstrosity to examine whiteness. Monstrosity is a malleable and culturally specific category of difference that measures alterity, and by displaying discursive functions in an extreme form offers insight into the ways in which deviance and normativity operate. I argue that the conjunction of whiteness and monstrosity, through displaying whiteness in a negative register, depicts some of the discursive operations that enable whiteness to attain such hegemonic dominance. I deploy theories of marginalisation and subjectivation drawn from a variety of feminist, critical race, and philosophical perspectives in order to further an understanding of the discursive operations of hegemonic and normative subject positions. I offer a brief history and overview of both the history and prior conceptualisations of monstrosity and whiteness, and then focus on two particular examples of contemporary white monstrosity. I closely examine the representation of monstrosity in serial killer films. The figure of the serial killer is typically a white, heterosexual, middle class male whose monstrosity is implicitly reliant upon these elements. In my discussion of the recent phenomenon of fatal shootings at high schools in North America, I investigate the way the massacre at Columbine High School functions as the public face of the phenomenon and for the unique interest it generated in the mass media. I focus on a Time magazine cover that featured a photograph of the adolescent perpetrators under the heading The Monsters Next Door, which condensed and emblematised the tension that they generated. It is through the perpetrators uneasy occupation of dual subject positions???namely the unassuming all American boy and the contemporary face of evil???that their simultaneous representation as average and alien undermines the notion of whiteness as neutral and invisible.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.