Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2009. / Thesis advisor: Robert Dunne. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-83). Also available via the World Wide Web.

The purpose of this study is to present an archetypal analysis of the major British Gothic novels; to provide an analysis of the significance of demonic and apocalyptic imagery, the archetypal patterns of imagery which inform the pack of Tarot, and the work done in analyses of archetypal patterns of imagery by Freud and Jung for the Gothic novel; and to provide an explication of Dracula as myth and the consummate Gothic novel.A defense of the major British Gothic novels (The Castle of Otranto, Melmoth the Wanderer, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, The Romance of the Forest, The Italian, Frankenstein, Vathek, Dracula) has been included in the text of the study, and an argument for the pervading influence of Gothicism in fiction is advanced herein.Gothicism in fiction represents a manifestation of the diabolical reversal of archetype and myth. Gothic fiction is given to a use of obsessive symbols and patterns of imagery, as well as to a "dream syndrome" mythic and archetypal in design. The dominant symbol of Gothic fiction is that of the ruined place, the great Gothic castle. The major plot line of Gothic fiction, and particularly that of Dracula, is that of the Quest motif, which owes much to the medieval romances and Grail legends. For Gothic fiction, the Grail Quest is diabolically reversed.A hitherto unwritten argument and explanation for the ritual of The Fool's Quest through the Honors Series of the Tarot is included, because the ritual of the Honors Series of the Tarot (hinted at by A. E. Waite and Eden Gray, but never fully demonstrated) is of prime significance for an appreciation of Gothic fiction.An analysis of the Gothic hero's or heroine's quest (a diabolical reversal of the Quest motif studied by Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance) is included; Bram Stoker's Jonathan Harker's role is shown to be that of the Quest hero whose Quest suffers the diabolical reversal of myth common to the Gothic novel. The frequent dreams included in Gothic novels are commented upon, chiefly from a paradigm for analysis suggested by Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams), Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious), and the Tarot. The dreams of Gothic fiction are shown to be dreams of flying, falling, dental stimuli, or parturition.Works ranging from the Tarot through the works of Freud and Jung to Montague Summers' The Vampire: His Kith and Kin and Frederick Thomas Elworthy's The Evil Eye are included in the text that attempts to demonstrate the significance of Gothic fiction as a serious art form, and to establish its place in the tradition of myth and archetype. Bram Stoker's Dracula stands at the acme of that tradition, as the greatest Gothic work. As a compendium of ancient arcana, Dracula knows few rivals in fiction, and as a work of art which demonstrates the properties of world myth and archetype, and the diabolical reversal thereof, the book has no equal.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.A.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by Annette Van; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Aug. 25, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-54).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Literature, December 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-189). Also available on the Internet.

À partir des années 1970, le roman Dracula de Bram Stoker (1897) a connu une série inattendue d’éditions critiques, qui ont contribué en même temps à la canonisation d’une œuvre de fiction considérée auparavant comme dédaignable et à la perpétuation des points de vue du roman sur la Transylvanie et la Roumanie. En général, les éditeurs suivent le principe selon lequel les annotations doivent permettre au public d’aujourd’hui d’avoir une expérience de lecture similaire à celle des premiers lecteurs et aussi proche de l’intention de l’auteur que possible. Dans le cas de Dracula, cela présuppose que beaucoup des choix idéologiques de Stoker restent inexpliqués et indisputés, tandis que ses représentations des peuples et des lieux “lointains” sont soutenues par l’usage que font les éditeurs des notes de travail du romancier. Stoker a pris note, en les modifiant, des centaines de citations de différentes sources qu’il a ensuite incorporées dans le texte du roman. Les éditeurs de Dracula se fient à ces notes, sans prendre en compte les changements opérés par le romancier, les passages qu’il a utilisés mais qui n’apparaissent pas dans les notes, ou le fait que les sources sont souvent biaisées ou simplement érronées. Ainsi, les éditions critiques du roman de Stoker préservent et même contribuent au processus d’altérisation commencé par l’auteur de Dracula. L’analyse du discours d’altérisation est directement liée à la discussion du contexte historique du roman, c’est-à-dire le statut néo-colonial de la Roumanie, abordé dans la deuxième partie de cette étude. Les faits qui y sont mis en valeur montrent que ce que Stoker savait et ceux qu’il connaissait ont influencé ses choix d’endroits, de personnages et d’intrigue. L’implication de la Grande Bretagne dans l’économie et la politique de la region, avant et après la Guerre de Crimée, attestée par la présence des aventuriers coloniaux britaniques et par celle de la marine militaire anglaise sur le Danube, n’a guère était étudiée par les historiens. Le même peut être dit de l’implication de Londres au sein de la Commission Européenne du Danube. La présente étude pourrait aussi être utile aux spécialistes du postcolonialisme, de la mondialisation ou à ceux qui s’intéressent aux transformations apportées par le capitalisme dans le Bas Danube et à l’intégration des principautés roumains dans le marché économique mondial. Stoker a trouvé ses sources parmi les écrits des voyageurs en Transylvanie et Roumanie qui se préoccupaient des avantages économiques offerts par ces pays. Leurs écrits ont d’abord stimulé et ensuite soutenu l’implication de la Grande Bretagne dans l’économie de la région. La présente thèse va au-delà d’une autre frontière, en passant des études littéraires à l’anthropologie. Les anthropologues culturels peuvent trouver utile la discussion du temps et de la différence dans le roman de Stoker et dans les annotations des éditeurs. Dans les deux cas, il s’agit de la collection et de la manipulation des données concernant une région européenne « lointaine ». La (non)existence des croyances aux vampires est une situation qui peut fournir un aperçu des pratiques traditionnelles mais aussi, ce qui est plus important, des conséquences profondes du travail anthropologique du dix-neuvième siècle. Bien qu’elle soit un examen des éditions les plus richement annotées du roman de Bram Stoker, la présente étude est interdisciplinaire. Elle utilise des théories et des conceptes de plusieurs domaines, tout en attirant l’attention sur les liens complexes entre la culture, l’histoire, la politique et l’économie. Ce que cette étude montre surtout, c’est le lien étroit entre l’objet littéraire et le contexte dans lequel il a été produit. / Since the 1970s, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has gone through an unexpectedly long series of scholarly editions, which has contributed both to the canonisation of a work of fiction previously considered undeserving and to the perpetuation of the novel’s views on Transylvania and Romania. As a rule, editors follow the principle according to which their annotations should allow today’s audience a reading experience similar to that of the original reader and as close to the author’s intention as possible. In Dracula’s case, this means that much of Stoker’s ideological choices remain unexplained and unchallenged, while his representations of “remote” people and places are supported by the editors’ use of the writer’s working notes. Stoker took down, in altered form, hundreds of quotes from several sources that he incorporated into the text of the novel. The editors of Dracula rely heavily on these notes, without taking into account the changes brought by the novelist, the passages that he used but do not appear in the notes, and the fact that the sources were often biased or simply wrong. Thus, the many scholarly editions of Stoker’s novel preserve and even enhance its original process of othering. The analysis of the othering discourse is closely linked to the discussion of the historical context of the novel, that is, to the neo-colonial status of Romania, examined in the second part of this study. The information unearthed here shows that who and what Stoker knew influenced his choice of place, plot and character, which can provide a new line of inquiry for both literary critics and historians. The involvement of Great Britain in the economy and politics of the region, before and after the Crimean War, attested by the presence of British colonial adventurers and by that of the British navy on the river Danube, has only been marginally studied by historians, and the same is true about the study of the British involvement in the European Commission of the Danube. The present study can be equally useful to scholars engaged with postcolonialism, globalisation, and the transformations brought about by capitalism in the Lower Danube region and by the integration of the Romanian principalities into the world market economy. Stoker’s sources were travellers to Transylvania and Romania who were preoccupied with the economic advantages those countries had to offer. Their writings both stimulated and, later, supported the British involvement in the economy of the region. This dissertation crosses yet another boundary, from literary studies into anthropology. Cultural anthropologists can find useful the discussion of time and difference in Stoker’s novel and in the annotations of the editors, both of which involve the collection and manipulation of data from a “remote” European region. In the case of Dracula, the (non)existence of vampire beliefs is an interesting case study which provides insight into the practice but, more importantly, into the far-reaching consequences of nineteenth-century anthropological work. Although an examination of the most heavily annotated scholarly editions of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel, the present study is interdisciplinary. It employs theories and concepts from several fields, thus bringing to the fore the intricate links between culture, history, politics and economy. What this study shows, more importantly, is the close link between the literary object and the context in which it was produced.

This dissertation is intended primarily as a contribution to postcolonial criticism and theory and the rhetorical analysis of epidemic writing as they undergo various crises and sublimations in the geopolitical landscape that has come into focus since the multilateral undertaking of the War on Terror in 2001. I begin with a set of questions about representation: when, how, and why are extra-legal, insurgent, anti-colonial, and terrorist forms of violence figured as epidemics in literature and connected discursive forms? What events in colonial history and scientific practice make such representations possible? And how do these representational patterns and their corollary modes of interpretation both reflect and transform discourse and policy? Although the figure is ubiquitous, it is far from simple. I argue that the discourse of the late colonial era is crucial to an understanding of how epidemiological science arises and converges with colonial management technologies, binding the British response to the 1857 mutiny and a growing Indian nationalism to the development of surveillance and quarantine programs to eradicate the threat of the great nineteenth century epidemic, the so-called Indian or Asiatic cholera. Through a constellation of readings of key texts in the British and French colonial and postcolonial traditions, including selected works of Bram Stoker (Dracula, "The Invisible Giant"), Albert Camus (La Peste, Chronique Algérienne) and Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, Joseph Anton), I demonstrate how epidemics have played a complex representational role in relationship to violence, enabling us to imagine specific kinds of actors as absolute, powerful enemies of biological and social life, while also recoding violent political action as an organic affliction in order to efface or suppress the possibility of agency. There are two crucial aspects of this story that run throughout the histories and texts I engage with in this project. The first is that the figure of insurgent violence as epidemic has two opposing, yet interrelated faces. One looks to the promise of scientism, data collection and rational study as a means of eradicating the threat of irregular warfare. This is the function of the figure embedded in the practices and progress of epidemiology. On the other hand, the mythopoetics of infectious disease also point toward the occult and the unknowable, and code natural forces of destruction as sublime and inevitable. This is the function of the figure embedded the literary and political history of the term terror, which encompasses both natural and political events and the structures of feeling to which they give rise. The result of this duality is the persistent epistemic collapse of data-driven rational scientism and irrational sublimity in texts where epidemic and terror are at issue. The second crucial aspect of this story is that the dissolution of a colonial world system changes the shape of thinking about both epidemics and violence by displacing a binary architecture of antinomy in both public health and politics. The broadened view of epidemic since the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, has moved us away from metaphors of bellicosity to a more multi-factorial view of bacteriology and virology in temporal, geographic, and demographic space. One of the main goals of this project is to examine the relationship between these shifting epistemologies, narrative form, and imperial strategy. A connected through-line in the dissertation attempts to map what becomes of the biologistic and organicist conception of the state--which are already a matter of representation and imagination--as the very notions of biotoic life and the purview of the organism undergo no less radical redefinitions than the concept of the nation itself, providing the conceptual underpinnings for a subsequent biomorphic conception of the globe.

Le projet de mémoire cherche à retrouver les influences de la Fantasmagorie du 19e siècle dans le cinéma d'aujourd'hui, en particulier dans le genre du film de vampire. Nous abordons les procédés et techniques optiques qui mettent en images l'expérience d'un monde en proie à de grands changements sociohistoriques, et surtout, comment le cinéma a intégré ces données. L'imaginaire fantasmagorique a conditionné l'émergence des techniques optiques qui ont mené au cinématographe, et en cela, le médium cinématographique est bien emblématique de cette époque caractérisée par l'industrialisation et le retour d'un passé laissé en arrière par la modernité historique. Le cinéma, comme dispositif comprenant machine, image et sujet regardant, est mis en relation avec les dispositifs optiques du théâtre d'ombre, de la lanterne magique de Robertson et de la photographie, pour ainsi faire émerger le contexte technique, historique et psychologique de l'époque. Nous mettons l'accent sur les notions visuelles de l'apparition, de la projection et de la réification afin de souligner le retour d'un ancien regard qui prévalait avant l'arrivée de l'image mécanisée. En somme, lors des deux premières parties, c'est à l'Histoire moderne, son temps linéaire et la hantise qu'ils provoquent, que le cinéma sera relié. C'est à travers la figure du vampire que nous examinerons le cinéma; cette créature fantastique entretient bien des affinités métaphoriques avec le médium et elle nous permet d'entrevoir clairement toute la Fantasmagorie du 7e art. Avec un corpus filmique incluant certains films découlant du roman Dracula de Bram Stoker, nous allons voir comment la technologie du 19e siècle dévoile l'aspect mythique de la pensée rationnelle et moderne. L'image, dans sa grande tradition cultuelle ou/et artistique, semble répondre à des impératifs inconscients et archaïques, à des fantasmes premiers devant la mort et l'éternité, même si elle est produite par un appareil mécanique. C'est en cela que la technique moderne arbore des qualités fantasmagoriques qui, tout comme le vampire, nous remettent en contact avec ce que la civilisation occidentale a refoulé. Notre attention est donc portée avec insistance sur les façons dont l'image filmique et le regard qu'elle convoque, font resurgir d'anciens modes de perception et d'interprétation illusoirement relégués à l'époque pré-moderne. ______________________________________________________________________________

Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss, 2003

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