Although the sensational world of Gothic literature may seem to have little to do with the “dismal science” of economics, readers and critics have long recognized connections between Romantic-era political economic discourse and Gothic novels, from the trope of the haunted castle on contested property to Adam Smith’s metaphor of the spectral “invisible hand.” This study, the first sustained investigation of economics and the Gothic, reads Romantic Gothic literature as an important voice in public debates about the economic ideas that shaped the emerging phenomenon of commercial society. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of the modern social imaginary, it argues that the ways in which Gothic literature interrogated these ideas continues to inform our understanding of the economy and our place within it today. Each chapter focuses on an economic idea, including property, coverture, credit, debt, and consumption, in relation to a selection of representative Gothic texts, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848). It analyzes these texts—primarily novels, but also short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—in the context of political economic writings by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others. Through this analysis, this study argues that economic ideas are foundational to the Gothic, a mode of literature deeply engaged with the political, cultural, social, and economic upheavals that characterize the Romantic Age. / Graduate / 2021-05-14

The late eighteenth century marks an era where authors began forging identities that rebuffed the influences of the local communities to which they belonged. As literacy increased, so too did the notion of individuality, as members of the middle and lower orders soon saw themselves as separate, independent beings. The crowd, of course, helped simplify the management of complex emotions like anger through mutual demonstration; the greater number of participants in a protest, the more fitting the sense of indignation seemed to be. For cases of personal anger, however, the suitability and expression of the emotion were problematic, especially for those marginalized by gender, status, and political affiliations. While polite society deemed their anger unwarranted, odious, and threatening, subaltern authors simultaneously realized that the continued denial of the passion would cripple individual and artistic development, but excessive expression would yield further ridicule and ostracism. Anger, therefore, stimulated these authors to discover their actual worth as artists and individuals and carve unique identities that completely disregarded the restrictive characterizations assigned by a hierarchical society. Nevertheless, anger’s volatility meant that discovering oneself from a passion commonly represented as a moment “when we are not ourselves” was a particularly precarious endeavor since righteous indignation could quickly ignite into a mindless, destructive rage. Subaltern authors needed to authenticate the legitimacy of their anger to not only a largely unsympathetic audience, but also themselves, and the apparent foreignness of rage created confusion over the passion’s exact relation to the individual; anger is frequently emblematized in contradictions—internal vs. external, activity vs. passivity, sanity vs. insanity, reality vs. fantasy—to emphasize its deceptive fluidity. As this study argues, anger was fundamental to marginalized figures in achieving selfhood, but the passion’s overall instability and the objection by hierarchical society encouraged a literary treatment that was cautious, unique, and at times, clandestine.

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<p>Although the novels seem rather disparate at first glance, both Susan Musgrave's The Charcoal Burners and Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic share a gothic tendency. Gothicism textures these novels, and I would argue, textures many other works of Canadian fiction. Gothicism remains, however, an unstudied angle of Canadian literature, as it remains a critical blind spot in the studies of Musgrave' s and Marlatt' s novels. By exploring the gothicism of The Charcoal Burners and Ana Historic, I simultaneously recenter the gothic genre in both the texts at hand and indirectly in Canadian literature. This study focuses on what we can call female gothic. Female gothic refers to gothic literature written by women, with women-centered agendas. Female gothic is based on the experiences of women who suffocate under the culture's patriarchal construction of gender and sexuality. Women writers have long used the gothic form to explore issues specific to women's lives, issues that are currently being politicized and are circulating in feminist theoretical debates. In many female gothics, writers show how "woman," as a being who is sexually constructed, is defined and limited specifically by her reproductive capacity: her "nativity" is a source of horror. The trope of "nativity" operates in Musgrave and Marlatt through women's reproduction and sexuality, but also, in a strange, perhaps specifically Canadian gothic twist, through the figure of the indigene, who is also constructed with "nativity."</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / This thesis examines the ways two Victorian authors employed the literary vampire to respond to contemporary anxieties regarding women and their role in society. The primary texts of interest in this thesis are Florence Marryat's 1897 novel The Blood of the Vampire and Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla. This thesis explores the way each story frames the vampire’s gender, sexuality, and racial background through the lens of her monstrosity. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

In her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor notes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one” (44). In the introduction to this collection, I investigate the importance of the grotesque, gothic, and surreal elements that tend to make up the depictions of the South in the works of authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Brad Watson and several horror writers, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, exploring how horror can be used to emphasize the stranger elements of Southern fiction. In my own stories, I present both realistic depictions of suffering and sin in the South, as well as the strange and surreal, presenting the South not just as a world for freaks, but as a freakish world in and of itself.

"My thesis compares Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter in order to demonstrate how a) each text is a product of its moment and a reflection of corresponding critical thought and b) how an inversion of gothic tropes in Sleeping reflects a changed world dynamic, a melancholic exploration of epistemological and traumatic loss that can be seen not only as a recognition of the continued power of oppressive systems but a reflection on the failure of cosmopolitanism to “rescue” the global subject from her own isolation and recolonization. I claim that this is not only demonstrated by a change in form and how gothic tropes are presented, but in how homosexuality and deviant sexuality in particular is treated, a reminder that even in texts that attempt to condemn and reject colonizing tendencies, the political moment and its theoretical appendages continue to haunt postcolonial discourse, enabling recolonization and restratifying spaces of resistance. I claim that this recognition need not be totalizing or nihilistic, but that in the recognition itself lies the possibility for resistance, an act of rebellion that must be constantly re-enacted in order to deterritorialize what has been captured and displaced, a fluid and imaginative negotiation that, much like literature, is limitless in interpretation and offers readers constant and multiplicitous possibilities for agency in the face of equally fluid oppressive systems."--Provided by the author.

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The Gothic novel plays on the exaggeration of prescribed sex roles and uses various narrative techniques to produce a social commentary on gender politics and to illustrate the consequences of a destroyed social structure. Through the examination of the construct of the Gothic narrative and its fragmentary style, the novels of Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Jane Austen reveal similar treatments of the sexuality of their characters. The implementation of key Gothic elements—such as the castle, tyrannical father, and distressed damsel—serve to propel the novels’ questioning of the patriarchal system, the theme of women as commodities, and the economic value of sexuality. In addition to creating bizarre atmospheres of suspense and mystery, the authors artfully weave the fantastic elements of the Gothic into real responses to the changing culture and sexual anxiety of eighteenth-century England.

The project explores the ‘Gothic Line’ as observed in ornament. Escaping strictly geometrical means of defining, the study focuses on capturing the Line’s elusive properties in connection to chosen architectural elements. With selected properties, the two-dimensional principles are extracted into the 3D environment. Using parametric design tools each feature is transformed into multiple prototypes of three-dimensional interpretation. The project aims to capture subtlety of the Gothic Line while providing a system enabling creation of architecturally relevant ornamental structures.