Because works of Gothic fiction were often disregarded as sensationalist and unsophisticated, my aim in this thesis is to explore the ways in which these works actually drew attention to real societal issues and fears, particularly anxieties around Otherness and identity and gender construction. I illustrate how the context in which authors were writing specifically influenced the way they portrayed the supernatural in their narratives, and how the differences in their portrayals speak to the authors’ distinct aims and the issues that they address. Because the supernatural ultimately became internalized in the American Gothic, peculiarly within female bodies, I focus mainly on the relationship between the supernatural and the female characters in the texts I examine. Through this historical exploration of the transformation of the supernatural, I argue that the supernatural became internalized in the American Gothic because it reflected national anxieties: although freed from the external threat of the patriarchal English government, Americans of the young republic still faced the dangers of individualism and the failure of the endeavor to establish their own government.

Dissertação(mestrado) - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras, Instituto de Letras e Artes, 2008. / Submitted by Cristiane Silva (cristiane_gomides@hotmail.com) on 2012-10-18T15:07:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 marciaklee.pdf: 2550313 bytes, checksum: b427beaad001d7f4f2de4006e5d323d4 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Bruna Vieira(bruninha_vieira@ibest.com.br) on 2012-11-05T19:39:50Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 marciaklee.pdf: 2550313 bytes, checksum: b427beaad001d7f4f2de4006e5d323d4 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2012-11-05T19:39:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 marciaklee.pdf: 2550313 bytes, checksum: b427beaad001d7f4f2de4006e5d323d4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / O presente trabalho propõe o estudo de Changing Heaven – romance de Jane Urquhart publicado em Toronto, Canadá, pela editora Emblem Editions, em 1990. Com ele, pretendo demonstrar a relação existente entre o universo romanesco proposto por Urquhart e aquele da tradição gótica inglesa de autoria feminina, com a qual ela abertamente dialoga. Além disso, aproximo Changing Heaven da série anglo-canadense para o mesmo gênero, estabelecendo, entre eles, relações que visam a caracterizar a feição assumida por esta narrativa junto ao país de Urquhart. Por fim, discorro brevemente sobre de que forma Changing Heaven dialoga com ou revisa a linhagem/ancestralidade de romances góticos de autoria feminina. O conceito de gótico feminino utilizado aqui é aquele cunhado por Ellen Moers (1977). Para o estudo do gótico, embora muitas fontes tenham sido consultadas, vali-me principalmente das concepções de Eugenia DeLamotte e seu Perils of the night: a feminist study of the nineteenth century Gothic (1990). Neste estudo, defendo que a moldura gótica adotada por Urquhart em Changing Heaven permite-lhe sublinhar os temas da identidade, alteridade, memória e o processo de criação artística, bem como reafirmar sua escritura através do diálogo com o romance Wuthering Heights (1897), da inglesa Emily Brontë, a grande matriz narratológica por trás do seu romance. / The present work proposes a study of Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven, a novel first published in Toronto, Canada, by Emblem Editions Press in 1990. It aims at demonstrating the relation between the novelistic universe as conceived by Urquhart and that of the female Gothic English tradition, with which she overtly dialogs. Moreover, I bring Changing Heaven near the Anglo-Canadian series of the same genre so as to trace parallels that ultimately intend do explicit the features that shape this kind of narrative in Urquhart’s country. Last, I briefly go over on how Changing Heaven dialogs with or contributes to revise the lineage/tradition of female Gothic novels. The concept of female Gothic used here is the one coined by Ellen Moers (1977). For the study of the Gothic itself, even though many sources have been consulted, Eugenia Delamotte’s Perils of the night: a feminist study of the nineteenth century Gothic (1990) has proved to be especially relevant. In this work, the point made is that the Gothic frame used by Urquhart allows this writer to underline issues concerning identity, otherness, memory and the process of artistic creation, as well as to restate her own writing praxis through the dialog with the novel Wuthering Heights (1897), by Emily Brönte, the main intertext behind Urquhart’s novel.

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Hin Ondes hus är Aurora Ljungstedts debutroman från 1853. Tidigare forskning har uppmärksammat romanen som en av Sveriges första och mest renodlade gotiska romaner. Hur ideologiska aspekter såsom genusfrågor kommer till uttryck i texten är dock outforskat till övervägande del. Den här studiens syfte är därför att öka förståelsen för hur romanens gotiska element kan kopplas till genusfrågor. Detta åstadkoms genom att romanen analyseras utifrån teoribildningen female gothic. Analysen visar att romanens dramaturgi och skräckskildringar till övervägande del följer de konventioner som förknippats med female gothic. Typiskt gotiska motiv, som dubbelgångare, ödesbestämdhet och känslan av das unheimliche bidrar också till att kvinnan skildras som utsatt och maktlöshet i hemmet, äktenskapet och patriarkatet. En implikation av analysen är att Ljungstedts texter redan tidigt i författarskapet präglades av ett kvinnoperspektiv. / Hin Ondes hus [The House of the Devil] is Aurora Ljungstedt’s debut novel from 1853. Earlier research has recognized the novel as one of Sweden’s first and most distinctive Gothic novels. However, in what ways ideological aspects, such as gender issues, are expressed in the text is largely unexplored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to further the understanding of how the novel's Gothic elements are related to gender issues. This is achieved by analyzing the novel using Female Gothic theory. The analysis shows that the novel's plot and depictions of fear largely align with the conventions associated with the Female Gothic. Typical Gothic motifs, such as doubles, a sense of predetermination, and a sense of das unheimliche also contribute in portraying the woman as vulnerable and powerless in the home, in marriage and in patriarchy. One implication of the analysis is that Ljungstedt's texts were characterized by a woman’s perspective from early on in her writing.

This dissertation documents how a series of cynical 1940s Hollywood films set in historical eras served as a forum for Hollywood to reconcile the complex relationship between America and its European past. While these films are rarely discussed in the ongoing discourse surrounding film noir, this study posits that they function as “noirs of the past” by transposing the pessimism and trauma surrounding World War II to the distant American and European past in a narrative and stylistic manner consistent with film noir. Film noir is a branching term to describe a group of 1940s and 50s Hollywood crime melodramas that are known for their cynical worldviews and femme fatales. Produced during the war and postwar era, film noirs primarily depict squalid urban settings that underscore the broken promise that is the American Dream. However, this project maintains that many of these noirs also critique American society through historical settings that trace present-day class and gender problems back to the European aristocracy and its excesses. Noirs of the past are universally ignored in debates surrounding historical films because they appear at first blush to have little interest in depicting historical events in a precise manner. This is for good reason: they openly resist historical accuracy by employing devices that highlight their artificiality. The noir of the past’s lack of historical verisimilitude further extends to character types, dialogue, costumes, and aesthetics that feel closer in spirit to the gloomy shadows of contemporary-set film noirs than the glossy and monumental historical films of the 1940s. Through their overlap of historical and contemporary 1940s signifiers, “noirs of the past” construct a sense of location and time that borrows from both the past and present to demonstrate the cyclical nature of events and figures across history.

In My Gothic Dissertation, I perform an intertextual analysis of Gothic fiction and modern-day graduate education in the humanities. First, looking particularly at the Female Gothic, I argue that the genre contains overlooked educational themes. I read the student-teacher relationships in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831), and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as critiques of the insidious relationship between knowledge and power. Part literary critic and part literary journalist, I weave through these readings reports of real-life ‘horror stories’ of graduate school, arguing that the power imbalance between Ph.D. advisors and their students can be unexpectedly ‘Gothic’ as well. Drawing on research from the science of learning—developmental psychology, sociology, and pedagogical theory—I advocate for more a student-centered pedagogy in humanities Ph.D. training. Following in the footsteps of A.D. Carson and Nick Sousanis, I have produced My Gothic Dissertation in a nontraditional format—the podcast. Mixing voice, music, and sound, I dramatize scenes from the novels and incorporate analysis through my narration. The real-life “Grad School Gothic” stories are drawn from personal interviews. Much of the science of learning is drawn from personal interviews with researchers as well, though some material comes from recorded presentations that have been posted to public, online venues such as YouTube. The creative/journalistic style of reporting is heavily influenced by programs such as This American Life, Invisibilia, and Serial, with the dual aims of engaging a broad audience and expanding our modes of scholarly communication beyond the page.

The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern British Female Gothic fiction in terms of its abject representations of female desire which subvert the patriarchal definition of female sexuality as repressed and female identity as the object of desire. The study analyzes texts from postmodern Female Gothic fiction which are feminist rewritings of the traditional Gothic narratives. The conventional Gothic plot is based on the Oedipal development of identity which excludes the (m)other and deprives the female from autonomous subjectivity. The feminist rewritings of the conventional Gothic plot have a subversive aim to recast the Oedipal identity formation and they embrace the (m)other figure in order to blur the strict boundaries between the subject and the object. Besides, these rewritings aim to destroy the image of the victimized heroine within the imprisoning conventional Gothic structures and transgress the cultural, social and sexual definitions of women constructed by patriarchal sexual politics. The study bases its analyses on Jean Rhys&rsquo / s Wide Sargasso Sea, Angela Carter&rsquo / s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Emma Donoghue&rsquo / s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins as examples in which patriarchal definition of the female desire as passive is destroyed and the female desire as active is promoted by the adoption of abject representations, which challenge the strictly constructed hierarchical relationships between men and women. Basing its argument on Julia Kristeva&rsquo / s psychoanalytical theories, which re-vision the traditional psychoanalytical theories, this study puts forward that by the emergence of postmodernism, which has overtly provided a ground for the marginalized discourses to get into dialogue with the oppressive ones, the abject representations of female desire have gained a positive characteristic that can liberate female body from the control and authority of the male-dominated ideology. Thus, one can chronologically follow the positive development of abject representations of female sexuality in Rhys&rsquo / s, Carter&rsquo / s and Donoghue&rsquo / s works which promote a liberation for the Gothic heroines from patriarchal psychoanalytical identity development, which render female desire active and female body expressive, which rehistoricize female sexuality from a feminist lens and which call for a new world order built upon an egalitarian basis that destroys hierarchically constructed gender roles. As a result, postmodern British Female Gothic Fiction is proved to be offering a utopian ideal of an egalitarian society, but although utopian and radical, not an impossible one to be realized.

In an attempt better to understand the appeal of the Gothic novel during its initial appearance in eighteenth-century England, particularly that of the 'female Gothic'--a sub-genre recently declared by feminist critics such as Claire Kahane, Ellen Moers, and Tania Modleski--this essay considers three novels by Ann Radcliffe, possibly the best-known female writer of her time: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Italian (1797). Beginning with an examination of Radcliffe's unique use of landscapes and her adoption of Burke's Sublime, I postulate a symbology and subtext which address the generally unacknowledged topics of female sexuality and female creativity. The representation of feminine desire, as well as the continued theme of the hidden woman artist, I argue, together comprise the 'hidden discourse' integral to the 'female Gothic' pioneered by Radcliffe. Bearing in mind the emergence in the later eighteenth-century of a large female audience for Radcliffe's novels, l analyse the different physical prospects and personalities associated with heroine and villain as politically polarized 'visions' of reality. The inevitable moral and aesthetic conflict of these visions culminates in the heroine's ultimate triumph over the villain and the patriarchal society he represents. Through this analysis of her fiction's hidden discourse, Radcliffe's contribution to the Gothic genre can be seen as politically subversive, her novels concealing a defiance of her male-dominated culture as well as containing an affirmation of identity for her female readers. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

In this essay, the author analyzes the Gothic of Christina Rossetti in such poems as A Coast Nightmare, Shut Out, but also the well-known Goblin Market and the Prince's Progress. Interested in what the imagery of these poems convey, and intent on declaring Rossetti as a prominent example of Gothic poets, the author makes a strong case for the including of Rossetti among the great Gothics.

Uppsatsens syfte är att studera hur Victoria Mas roman De galna kvinnornas bal (2022) anspelar på traditionen female gothic och motivet den galna kvinnan i en kontext av 1800-talets patriarkala strukturer. Romanen studeras därför i relation till Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) och Selma Lagerlöfs Spökhanden (1898), för att urskilja hur motivet den galna kvinnan har använts i 1800-talets klassiska gotiska litteratur, och om några signifikanta skillnader förekommer i Mas (2022) moderna roman. Den komparativa och intertextuella studien utförs med en kvalitativ textanalys som inbegriper närläsningar och tolkningar av materialet i syfte att tolka och förstå den galna kvinnans framställning och funktion. Yvonne Hirdmans teori om genussystem och genuskontrakt tillämpas för att analysera hur den galna kvinnan underordnas en manlig auktoritetsfigur, och vilka oönskade egenskaper som hon fångar upp. Slutsatserna visar framför allt hur den galna kvinnan i De galna kvinnornas bal (Mas 2022) fyller en samhällskritisk funktion, eftersom romanen med en samtida röst slagkraftigt kritiserar den manliga auktoritetsfiguren till skillnad från jämförelsematerialet. Den galna kvinnans oönskade egenskaper framställs heller inte som orimliga eller farliga, vilket särskiljer sig från Jane Eyre (Brontë 1847) där den galna kvinnan framställs med aggressiva och farliga egenskaper. En annan signifikant skillnad i Mas (2022) roman är att den galna kvinnan framställs som ett intressant forskningsobjekt att experimentera på och visa upp för allmänheten, till skillnad från de galna kvinnorna i 1800-talstexterna.