Edgar Allan Poe is everywhere. His influence resonates not only in American literary criticism, but in popular culture where Homer and Bart Simpson act out "The Raven" in an episode of The Simpsons and Poe can be seen getting into a rap battle with Stephen King on the popular YouTube video series Epic Rap Battles. While a great deal has been written about the significance of Poe's oeuvre, few scholars have focused primarily on the grotesque in his short fiction. This thesis will explore Edgar Allan Poe's aesthetic influences, his place within the gothic tradition and describe the three elements that create his specific grotesque aesthetic: the affective reader, obsessive design, and haptic space. This thesis will describe how these elements whether in the unnamed narrator's bridal suite in "Ligeia" or the protagonist of "The Pit and the Pendulum" experiencing the apparatus of torture during the Spanish Inquisition, create a sense of indeterminacy, trapped between pain and pleasure, beauty and terror, life and death. Analyzing Poe's texts this thesis will describe these grotesque figurations and what these constructions mean narratively and artistically and how they inform the author's larger intellectual goals.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate. The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth-century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers.

Before the age of sensibility, the literary scaffold was a device, albeit one with its own set of associations. Its purpose was to arrest plot, create tension, and render character. Fictional representations of execution typically did not question the place of capital punishment in society. They were heroic events in which protagonists were threatened with a judicial device that was presumed righteous in every other case but their own. But in the eighteenth century, the fictional scaffold acquired new significance: it deepened a Gothic or sublime tone, tested reader and character sensibility, and eventually challenged the judicial status quo. The reliance on the scaffold to generate atmosphere, to wring our compassion, or to examine the legal value of the individual resulted in a new type of literature that I call scaffold fiction, a genre that persists to this day. Representations of execution in eighteenth-century tragedy, in Gothic narratives, and in novels of sensibility centered more and more on a hero’s scaffold anxiety as a means of enlarging pathos while subverting legal tradition. Lingering on a character’s last hours became the norm as establishment tools like execution broadsheets and criminal biography gave way to scaffold fictions like Lee’s The Recess and Smith’s The Banished Man—fictions that privilege the body of the condemned rather than her soul and no longer reaffirm the law’s prerogative. And because of this shift in the material worth of individuals, the revolutionary fictions of the Romantic era in particular induced questions about the scaffold’s own legitimacy. For the first time in Western literary history, representations of execution usually had something to imply about execution itself, not merely the justness of a particular individual’s fate. The first two chapters of my study are devoted to close readings of Georgian tragedy and Gothic novels, which provide a representative sample of the kinds of tropes particular to scaffold fiction (if they exist before the eighteenth century, they are less vivid, less present). The negotiation of a sentence, the last farewell, the lamentation of intimates, the imagined scaffold death of a loved one, and the taboo attachment of a condemned Christian to his flesh became more sustained and elaborate, opening up new arguments about the era’s obsession with sublimity, imagination, and sympathy, which in turn provide me with critical frameworks. The last two chapters pull back from the page in order to examine how literary representations of execution shifted as perspectives on the death penalty shifted. Anti-Jacobin fictions that feature the scaffold, for instance, were confounded by the device’s now vexed status as a judicial solution. Challenging the supposed authoritarian thrust of texts like Mangin’s George the Third and Craik’s Adelaide de Narbonne, the anti-Jacobin scaffold was swept up in a general reimagining of the object and its moral implication, which by extension helps to dismantle the reductive Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary which critics increasingly mistrust. My final chapter devotes space to William Godwin, whose novels underscore the moral horror of the scaffold not just as the ultimate reification of the law’s power but, more interestingly, as the terminus of the “poor deserted individual, with the whole force of the community conspiring his ruin” (Political Justice). Godwin, a Romantic writer who anticipates Victorian and twentieth-century capital reforms, brings the scaffold fiction of writers like Defoe and Fielding into fruition as he wrote and agitated at the height of the Bloody Code, creating a template for Dickens, Camus and a host of modern authors and filmmakers.

The aim of this master theses was to evaluate the thermal-hydraulic calculation software GOTHIC for the purpose of nuclear containment safety analyses. The evaluation was performed against some of the Marviken full scale containment experiments and a comparison was also made against the two codes RELAP5 and COPTA. Models with different complexity were developed in GOTHIC and the parameters pressure, temperature and energy in different areas of the enclosure was investigated. The GOTHIC simulations in general showed a good agreement with the Marviken experimental results and had an overall better agreement then RELAP5. From the results it was possible to conclude that the developed GOTHIC model provided a good representation of the Marviken facility.

Abstract Gothic fiction captivates adults probably because it always reminds them of childhood and the irrational and naïve responses to the invisible beings. In fact, fear initiated by terror intrinsic in ghost tales is not aimed to suppress desire, but turns to be an access for people to recognize their suppressed desires. Is Gothic fiction worth canonizing, deserving of the name of ¡§literature¡¨ when Gothic fiction tends to be associated with immature fear and desire, and for most people, it is particularly suited to the temporal possession for passing leisure and boring time, and then it is piled up even around the corner of the lavatory? My dissertation, however, starts with these pejorative terms: primitiveness, childhood, fantasy, terror and disposable commodity. Truly, this kind of popular literature appeals to great numbers of people, influencing a large portion of the population in the world, but is not credited accordingly. My intention is to discover the valuable relic that Gothic fiction has left among the contemptuous debris that the moralists and scholars have thrown at it. The strategy I adopt is to represent the milieu where Gothic fiction rises and falls in a historical and cultural perspective. Abroad, the American and French Revolutions break out in tandem, which instigate heated debates over ¡¥revolution,¡¦ and ¡¥history¡¦ in Britain. And the Reign of Terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution shocks the English monarch and aristocracy. The military conflicts between Britain and France increase. Domestically, the Industrial Revolution brings great impact to English society, precipitating the rise of the bourgeoisie and working class. Coincidentally, this literature of terror becomes the allegory of cultural and political convulsions that rack this nation. And the English people, especially the rising class, find the expression of their anxieties and expectations in Gothic fiction. In addition to reconstructing the network of political, social, aesthetic strains that are integrated into Gothic fiction, I attempt to depict how power shifts, changing the relationships of different factions and ranks of English society when commerce gradually dominates in the activity of literature. As is noted, Gothic fiction is conceived to be more than an innocent enchantment, or a palliative composed of nostalgia for childhood, or a consumable pastime. To indicate how Gothic fiction is rooted in the depth of English culture, I exemplify four English classics as well as bestsellers, and scrutinize them with the concept of ¡§spectralization¡¨ together with the theory of psychoanalysis. The four English Gothic novels I decided on are Ann Radcliffe¡¦s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis¡¦s The Monk, Mary Shelley¡¦s Frankenstein, and Charles Maturin¡¦s Melmoth, the Wanderer. With the spectralization of women, sexuality, ambition, and life in individual works, I endeavor to make the latent truth manifest. Thus, the visible and invisible states of existence are juxtaposed. These motifs indeed pertain to the anxious restlessness, painful sense of insecurity, and the tantalization of suppressed desires, which confronts the middle and lower classes as English society is going through rapid vicissitudes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Finally, I come to the conclusion that a common pattern of forming and suppressing of desire repeats itself in each novel as well as in the interactions of different participants in the establishment of the Gothic discourse. The suppression imposed on popular literature, such as thrillers and Gothic novels, in fact, originates from the bias that there are highbrow and lowbrow types of literature. And the critics, most of whom consider themselves arbiters of literary tastes and makers of literary canons, show contempt to the bestsellers in the book market. With my research, I expect to convince people that Gothic fiction can be defined as a literary asset, not a disposable forged relic. Writers and readers that favor popular literature do not have to apologize or feel ashamed for their devotion to it.

The Gothic novel becomes a vogue in the mid-eighteenth century, and its conventions still influence works today that try to fully present horror. The Gothic novel is distinct in its mood, style, and settings. It has established a tradition of horror fiction in which sexuality, violence, death, and immorality are interwoven. These themes work with supernatural power and spectral settings that transmits a deathly atmosphere. Put in such a context, characters cannot but feel the horror produced by those settings and the medieval style; henceforth, they are always situated in the mood of darkness which causes the feelings of sublime. These themes, settings, and style help the Gothic novel to form its own Gothic conventions which still influence the production of horror fiction. The first chapter analyzes how the sublime and uncanny effects produced by the conventions of the Gothic work against the morality of the time. Matthew Lewis manipulates the spectral techniques brought by the sublime and uncanny to pierce through the regulation of morality. The sublime effects transform horror experienced in reading into pleasure and the spectrality in supernatural descriptions makes the morality seem less apparent. The supernatural phenomena divert the reader from attention to issues of morality. The second chapter is to investigate how a set of standards concerning sexuality becomes binding and imperative to men and women in The Monk. In Lewis¡¦s novel, womanhood is the incarnation of the sublime, its sublimity consisting of a force that compels male and female characters to obey regulations concerning sexuality. Thus, from the sublimity of womanhood, a sexual ideological develops in the novel, Staying pure and sacred in body and soul is not only binding to woman but also to man. The thirst for power on the part of the novel¡¦s villains is an attempt to violate and destroy the power of womanhood; the novel¡¦s heroes are trying to embody that power. The third and final chapter is to investigate how the gendered bodies determined the gendered identities with the assistance of Judith Butler¡¦s theory of the gendered matrix, which defines gender types and forms gender identity. Following their gendered identity, each character is citing the corresponding ideological sexual strand. Their activities actually ¡§cite¡¨ the gendered concept and perform the gender identity through their bodies. Even though the stereotyped characters seem flat, there is still a gray area in the novel where clear-cut gender¡¦s performativity is improbable. Thus, on occasion, Lewis undercuts the gender constructions that he seems to endorse, making the Gothic and all the effects it produces a smoke screen behind which he can occasionally go against the grain of the (sexual) morality of his time. This double-layer quality of The Monk¡¦s morality makes reading that novel an act of piercing through artistic forms and wondering if what lies underneath them represents indeed the novel¡¦s core meaning.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1938. / Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. 157-183.

München, Phil. Diss. v. 1915 (17. Dez. 1914), Ref. Wölfflin.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago. / Biographical sketch.