This essay examines the structural relationship between the folktale and the gothic novel with focus on characterization. This study will present a clearer definition of the now problematized gothic genre and show how newer genres are influenced by the older ones. This examination is done by doing a close-reading of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which is generally known as the first gothic novel, and comparing it to formalist Vladimir Propp’s findings on the functions of the Russian folktale. Walpole’s novel is used as primary source of data and the key works by Propp is utilized as the theoretical framework. In addition, a couple of critical essays have been looked upon in relation to the previous works. This study finds that there are apparent similarities in structure and narrative in the gothic novel in relation to the folktale such as the presence of the same essential characters and functions. This proves the overlap between the two genres and it would be reasonable to conclude that the gothic genre consists of a part folktale. By the revelation of this previously unknown relationship between the folktale and the gothic genre this essay opens up for further research on the origin and influences of gothic fiction.

The aim of this paper is to examine Horace Walpole's contribution to the reawakening taste for Gothic in the eighteenth century and to relate his curiously ephemeral art forms to the broad historical development of the Gothic. No attempt has been made, except in an incidental way, to treat the initial flourishing of Gothic architecture; that the reader has at least a passing acquaintance with the architecture of the Middle Ages is assumed. Instead, the emphasis has been placed upon the Gothic survival of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; as Gothic architecture was virtually eclipsed during this period, many readers may feel that this emphasis is unwarranted. However, some study of the Gothic architecture in these two centuries is necessary in order to understand how and why the Gothic took the turn it did in the eighteenth century. Chapter one is a collection of evidence to show that, despite opinion otherwise, Gothic architecture did survive as a potent force. Chapter two then proceeds to discuss Walpole's creation of Strawberry Hill and to show how the attitudes and skills of previous generations helped to mould its form. The conclusion reached is that Strawberry Hill, while Gothic in design, lacked most of the medieval Gothic spirit; that Walpole was in fact using the Gothic for a new purpose. Chapter three is again a collection of evidence, this time a survey of the prevailing trends in "Gothic" literature before Walpole. In a sense, chapter four is the culmination of this discussion of the Gothic, since here the attempt is made to show how Walpole's Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was at once clearly in the earlier traditions of a classical interpretation of Gothic, and also a forerunner of an entirely new conception of Gothic. Walpole's influence upon later writers and his indebtedness to neo-Gothicizers is made clear by juxtaposing Walpole against the later school of Gothic novelists. To avoid a repetitious summary, some attempt has been made to characterize the essential differences existing between Walpole's Gothic and that of medieval artists by linking Walpole's creations with the rococo. An equation of eighteenth century Gothic with the rococo is of course foolish, and this was never contemplated; rather, the hope was to show that much of the spirit which stimulated Walpole's artistry is also endemic to the rococo. The eighteenth century Gothic, in particular Walpole's contribution, was actually a Gothic-rococo. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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.

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This thesis addresses the growing impulse towards establishing a public, national collection of Old Master pictures for Britain, located in London, in the last quarter of the eighteenth-century. It does so by identifying the importance of individual conceptualizations of what such a collection might mean for a nation, and how it might come to be realized for an imprecisely defined public. My thesis examines the shifting dynamics between private and public collections during the period of 1775 to 1800, repositioning notions of what constituted space for viewing and accessing art in a national context, and investigates just who participated in the ensuing dialogues about various uses of art for the nation. To this end, three case studies have been employed. The first examines the collection of pictures assembled by Sir Robert Walpole and their public legacy. The second explores the proposal for a national collection of art put forth by art dealer Noel Desenfans. The third examines the frustrated plans of Sir Joshua Reynolds for his collection of Old Master pictures. Through the respective lenses provided by the case studies, it is demonstrated that the envisioning of a national gallery for Britain pitched competing perspectives against each other, as different kinds of people jockeyed for cultural authority. The process of articulating and shaping these ambitions with an eye towards national benefit was only beginning to be explored, and negotiations of private ambitions and interests surrounding picture collections for the public was further complicated by factors of social class and profession. This thesis demonstrate that the boundaries of participation in matters concerning art for the nation were not fixed regarding Old Master pictures and the value placed on them in late eighteenth-century London. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2009-01-26 09:01:22.591

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University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

This narrative ethnography is based on seven years of research collaboration with the Walpole Island First Nation (WIFN). The study focuses on local perceptions of risk as they relate to ecosystem integrity, human health and well-being. Discourse analysis of generic and nuanced community narratives reveals diverse yet complementary situated knowledge that are firmly rooted in Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) cultural teachings, values and practices. Gerald Ryle and Clifford Geertz's conceptualization of thin and thick description is used to parse out the various components of what I've identified as a community genre of toxic talk. Within this model, thin description refers to observations of the surface metamorphoses of the physical environment through pollution and other anthropogenic changes. Thick description emerging from the analysis of elegies and echoes of loss and discourses of resistance illuminates the discursive tactics employed by community members to resist Western frameworks of risk analysis and re-situate the topic of environmental health within the wider interpretive matrix of structural violence. A proposed Shell refinery expansion project is used as an example of how WIFN actively mobilizes discourses via oral tradition in the struggle for environmental justice. Through the strategic use of toxic talk, the community draws attention to environmental issues while simultaneously laying bare to a wider, non-Native audience the historical scaffolding of Native issues that are part and parcel of contemporary environmental crises and their effective mediation and resolution. The 'discursive movement' from elegies and echoes of loss to discourses of resistance reframes Walpole Island residents from those who are defined by survivorship to those who embody and evoke a spirit of survivance. The dissertation concludes with a semiotic critique of the Western medical terms chemophobia and risk perception. This leads to the advancement of toxic talk as an alternative framework for acquiring a more politicized, historicized and humanized understanding of environmental concerns at Wal pole Island. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. Desmet and Williams, 2009), both of which base their analyses of the Shakespeare-Gothic intersection on the premise that Shakespearean quotations, characters and events are valuable objects in their own right which mediate on behalf of the 'present' concerns of the agents of textual appropriation. In light of this scholarship, this thesis argues the case for the presence of 'Gothic Shakespeare' in Gothic writing during the latter half of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, it acknowledges the conceptual gap whereby literary borrowings were often denounced as acts of plagiarism. Despite this conceptual problem, it is possible to trace distinct 'Gothic' Shakespeares that dismantle the concept of Shakespeare as a singular ineffable genius by virtue of a textual practice that challenges the concept of the 'genius' Shakespeare as the figurehead of genuine emotion and textual authenticity. This thesis begins by acknowledging the eighteenth-century provenance of Shakespeare's 'Genius', thereby distinguishing between the malevolent barbarian Gothic of Shakespeare's own time and the eighteenth-century Gothic Shakespeares discussed under the term 'appropriation'. It proceeds to examine the Shakespeares of canonical Gothic writers (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) as well as their lesser-known contemporaries (T.J. Horsley Curties and W.H. Ireland). For instance, Walpole conscripts Hamlet in order to mediate his experience of living in England after the death of his father, the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The thesis then argues for the centrality of Shakespeare in the Gothic romance's undercutting of the emergent discourses of emotion (or 'passion'), as represented by the fictions of Radcliffe and Lewis, before moving on to consider Curties's attempted recuperation - in Ethelwina; or, the House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) - of authentic passion, which is mediated through the authenticity apparatus of Edmond Malone's 1790 editions of Shakespeare's plays. It concludes with W.H. Ireland's dismantling of Malone's ceoncept of the 'authentic' Shakespeare through the contemporary transgressions of literary forgery and the evocation of an illicit Shakespeare in his first Gothic romance, The Abbess, also published in 1799.