The main assertion of this thesis is that both 19th century and contemporary Gothic literary texts are characterised by fugitivity, embodied by the fugitive ‘figure’ which through its ambiguity is re-deploying the distinction proposed by Ross Chambers – inescapably both narrative and textual. The fugitive figure is intimately related to desire and its textual mobilisation. This mobilisation simulates the paradoxical experience of the sublime in which the pursuer of the fugitive figure is left speechless before the feared and desired unnamable other. Anne Rice’s ‘The vampire chronicles’ are discussed, as are ‘Frankenstein’, ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and ‘Dracula’. Analysis of these texts constitutes a ‘genealogy’, conceived and executed in poststructuralist terms, consisting of a deconstructive analysis inflected by psychoanalytic inputs. The genealogy is applied to indicate the importance of the family structure and its potential for dissolution in Gothic texts, and recreates a search for origins, which is a recurring theme in Gothic writing. The fugitive figure, through its embodiment of insatiable desire, is beyond either narrative or tropaic apprehension. It is in continual metamorphosis and invites pursuit in its different guises. However, although it appears as the objectified pursued, it actually arises from within the pursuer, so any attempt to arrest the disruptive flow it signifies is, although unavoidable and necessary, a self-deceptive act doomed to failure. This failure is registered simultaneously at narrative and textual levels. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph.D) (Communication and Media) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1999. / Bibliography : p. 329-344.