ABSTRACT Medieval xenophobia fostered attitudes that viewed anything foreign or distasteful as monstrous. Accordingly, insular inhabitants of the Middle Ages were constantly striving to distinguish Self from Other. My dissertation argues that sixteenth-century England began to reverse this trend: it began to reconcile difference, not by distinguishing Self from Other, but by blurring those distinctions. Visions of ancient Self and contemporary Other began to fuse as proponents of Imperial Britain sought to assimilate foreign monsters that were once considered barbaric, inferior, or inhuman. This method of assimilation is especially apparent during the Elizabethan Age of conquest in the New World. England's prophetic destiny was inextricably tied to its epic history, its Trojan ancestry, and its most glorified rulers, Brutus and his distant successor, King Arthur. Thus, reestablishing and rewriting Britain's legendary past became an exercise in securing its future. I maintain that John Dee (c. 1527-1608/9) and Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599) strategically fused ancient Britain and the New World via the figures of King Arthur and his alleged descendant, Queen Elizabeth. Portions of Dee's Brytanici Imperii Limites are explored to illustrate this connection, as are some of his arcane mystical pursuits. I further examine sections of Spenser's Faerie Queene in relation to Queen Elizabeth and King Arthur, and interpret Arthur in Faery lond as a metaphor for England in the New World. My introduction establishes the key features of the Galfridian tradition and its significance to the Tudor dynasty. It further discusses medieval perceptions of the monstrous that influenced the early-modern era. Subsequent chapters argue that England's assimilation of Other extended to pagan deities and giants, Native Americans, ancient Israelites, and (in Elizabeth's case) to the feminine Other. My final chapter demonstrates how Queen Elizabeth, via her affiliation with King Arthur, became a temporal bridge uniting England's epic past with its future glory.

The state often enacts violence against marginalized groups by rendering them monstrous. The early eighteenth century saw early and stellar instances of this phenomenon in the way the British Empire pursued and executed pirates. These "golden age" pirates represented an extraordinary cross-section of marginalization politically, economically, socially, and otherwise, all of which threatened the political and social mores of Imperial Britain. In order to implement a policy and practice of pirate annihilation, British authorities constructed pirates as monstrous by racializing, dehumanizing, and emphasizing the supernatural quality of pirates. This study analyzes three eighteenth-century piracy trial transcripts--those of William Kidd, Stede Bonnet, and William Fly--in order to assess how lawyers and judges constructed pirates as monstrous so as to justify the massive and total violence inflicted on them as a class resulting in their complete destruction. In so doing, this study tracks rhetorical tactics and strategies still used by empires and the state today against marginalized peoples to an original historical source.

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<p>  </p> <p>Gender, anxiety, identity, and Gawain’s impossible choice have long been identified and examined as worth studying in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem <em>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</em>. By focusing on the different states of dress that Gawain finds himself in, the gendered behaviors he engages in, and the fact that he takes on and wears a piece of woman’s clothing as his own before his final encounter, it becomes clear that Gawain begins to utilize and slip into a gender fluid state of identity. His behaviors in Haut Desert cross gendered lines, but also the lines of private and public identity: Gawain’s fault is revealed at the Green Chapel, when the Green Knight reveals himself to be Bertilak as well as his knowledge of Gawain’s girdle. By taking up the green girdle, Gawain cross-dresses and gains access to alternative courses of action and paths towards virtue and survival. Upon returning to his court, his community must take on the girdle as a token of Gawain himself and integrate it in a way that allows for his gender fluidity to become enclosed within the borders of the chivalric community. Gawain’s survival and the benefit which he brings his court are materially represented by the girdle which stands for both the honorable and shameful, the knightly and the monstrous, and the feminine and masculine. </p>

Despite his own conservative values, D.H. Lawrence writes sexually liberated female characters. The most subversive female characters in Lawrence’s oeuvre are the Brangwens of The Rainbow. The Brangwens are prototypical models of a form of femininity that connects women to Nature while distancing them from society; his women are cast as monsters, but are strengthened from their link with Nature. They represent what I am calling the Lawrentian-Woman. The Lawrentian-Woman has proven influential for contemporary British authors. I examine the Lawrentian-Woman’s adoption by later writers and her evolution from modernist frame to postmodern appropriation. First, I look at the Brangwens. They establish the tropes of the Lawrentian-Woman and provide the base from which to compare the model’s subsequent mutations. Next, I examine modern British writers and their appropriation of the Lawrentian-Woman. The Lawrentian-Woman’s attributes remain intact, but are deconstructed in ways that explore women’s continued liminality in patriarchal society.

This study explores the construction of the Gothic female body in three films by the director Tim Burton, specifically Batman Returns (1992), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Dark Shadows (2012). Through a deployment of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the intention is to indicate the degree to which Burton crafts his leading female characters as abject Others and embodiments of Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’. In this Gothic portrayal, the director consistently draws on the essentialised stereotypes of Woman as either ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’ as he shapes his Gothic heroines and femmes fatales. While a gendered duality is established, this is destabilised to an extent, as Burton permits his female characters varying degrees of agency as they acquire monstrous traits. This construction of Woman as monster, this study will show, is founded on a certain fear of femaleness, so reinstating the ideology of Woman as Other. / English Studies / M.A. (English Studies)

Denna uppsats har analyserat gestaltningen av det feminina som skräckinjagande i de två gotik- och skräckromanerna Bunny (2020) av Mona Awad och Cackle (2022) av Rachel Harrison. Den metod som har använts har varit en textnära läsning av novellerna och den teori som analysen har utgått ifrån har huvudsakligen varit Maria Margareta Österholms avhandling Ett flicklaboratorium i valda bitar – Skeva flickor i svenskspråkigprosa från 1980 till 2005 (2012) som behandlar Mary Russos begrepp gurlesken och dess olika former, Sandra M. Gilbert och Susan Gubars teori om den internaliserade manliga blicken i deras bok The madwoman in the attic, The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination (1979), och Yvonne Lefflers teori om skräckberättelsens förmåga att väcka känslor hos läsaren i hennes bok Horror As Pleasure (2000). Syftet var att undersöka hur romanerna förhåller sig till sammanflätningen av det skräckinjagande och det feminina. Analysen har visat att den internaliserade och objektifierande blicken på kvinnorna är en viktig del i hur de skräckinjagande elementen framställs både groteska och hotfulla – särskilt vid framställningen av det feminina och kvinnomonster. Jag behandlar i den avslutande diskussionen hur det feminint monstruösa i dessa två romaner har förskjutits till ett mittemellanförskap som förhåller sig till förmågan hos publiken att konceptualisera situationerna. / This thesis aims to analyze the figuration of the feminine as something horrifying in the two horror novels Bunny (2020) by Mona Awad and Cackle (2022) by Rachel Harrison. The method is a close reading of the novels and the main theory is based on Maria Margareta Österholms dissertation Ett flicklaboratorium i valda bitar – Skeva flickor i svenskspråkigprosa från 1980 till 2005 (2012), in which she investigates Mary Russo's concept of the gurlesque, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s theory about the internalized male gaze from their book The madwoman in the attic, The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination (1979), and Yvonne Leffler’s study Horror As Pleasure (2000), about the aesthetic premises of the horror story and its ability to transform unpleasant feelings into pleasurable horror and aesthetic enjoyment. My thesis aims to investigate how the relationship between the horrifying and the feminine is intertwined in the novels. The analysis has shown that the internalized and objectifying gaze has an important part in the grotesque and threatening aesthetics of the horror story – especially in the depiction of the feminine and female monsters. I argue that the feminine monstrous in these two novels has made a shift into an” in-between-relationship” which behaves differently depending on the audience's ability to conceptualize the situations that arise in the novels.

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While the strategy of lending a voice to the monstrous is a well known aspect of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's works, the female monster is a notable exception to this case. In this thesis, I excavate a theory of female monstrosity through a reading of some of Lovecraft's most read stories and the agency of female characters that appears within. Comparing these female registers of monstrosity to their masculine counterpart, I develop a concept of female monstrosity manifested through categories of class, race and gender with the help of Judith Halberstams theories of monstrosity. Rather than treating these women as active characters, I argue that Lovecraft's inability to handle these monsters forces him to literally put them away – in attics, cellars, or boxes. These are the marginalized positions from which these women elaborate a monstrous form that transcends the boundaries of sex, gender, class and race. Here lurks a female monster, powerful, independent and evil, Lovecraft's treatment of which reveals his fear of its unfettered emergence. Thus Lovecraft’s narrative technique is broken by his own creation. Indeed, these women, in their reproductive capabilities and the monstrous motherhood they represent, are the true monsters of the Lovecraftian universe.

My visual art practice explores the point at which a sense of bodily humour and revulsion may intersect in the world of the monstrous-feminine: the female grotesque, presented as my own obese (and post-obese) body. This exegesis is a written elucidation of my visual art practice as research. As an artist I create performative photographic images featuring taboo or otherwise 'inappropriate' subject matter, situations, materials and behaviours including bodily fluids, offal, internal organs and my own post-obese body. Through these modes of working, I establish and investigate the subjectivity of flesh: Why are we repulsed by the female grotesque? How can this flesh be used to subvert readings of the female body? My research is informed by those understandings of the female body, sexuality and difference described in the work of feminist theorists including Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Ruth Salvaggio and Elizabeth Grosz. I explore the work of influential artists such as Eleanor Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas. In this context, I present my own visual art practice as a point from which the monstrous-feminine can be given voice as sentient, intelligent flesh.