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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a Gothic literary revival, which included the publication of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla ( 1872), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) within a twenty-five year period. The dissertation interprets such late nineteenth-century Gothic texts in light of the rise of Victorian anthropology and an anthropological paradigm based on Darwinian evolutionary theory. Before the 1860s, the study of human beings had been dominated by the discipline of ethnology; however, the ethnological paradigm, based on a Biblical understanding of human history, began to fracture with the discovery of prehistoric human remains at Brixham Cave (1858) and the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Those events brought the Biblical framework into question and created a sense of cultural trauma reflected in both scientific and popular debates on the origins of humanity. The anthropological paradigm, articulated in the writings of anthropologists such as Sir John Lubbock, Edward Burnett Tylor, and James Ferguson McLennan, managed the traumatic implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory by creating a hierarchical ladder of biological and cultural evolution that affirmed the primacy of human over animal, and civilized over savage. It also, by implication, supported the colonial enterprise by placing the European at the top of that ladder. Late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction posed a fundamental challenge to the optimistic progressionism of the anthropological paradigm and the hierarchical oppositions on which it was based by implying that Englishmen and women were not as different from the animal or savage as they believed, and that evolution itself was not always upward. By doing so, it re-traumatized what the anthropological paradigm attempted to contain, and pointed toward a more diverse and egalitarian definition of the human. The Gothic has often been seen as a conservative genre: the dissertation argues that understanding the ways in which late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction challenged the anthropological paradigm can reveal its disruptive, iconoclastic potential.

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Joris P Lindhout

Collegiate Gothic architecture can be found on many American campuses, yet its beginnings in nineteenth-century United States are something of a mystery. As the nation’s colleges and universities grew more innovative in their modernized curricula and research, strangely, their architecture became more anachronistic with Collegiate Gothic being the most popular. Around the greens of their campuses, Americans built quadrangles of crenellated buildings and monumental gate towers with stained-glass windows, gargoyles, pointed arches, turrets, and spires, thus transforming their collegiate grounds into likenesses of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Why medievalizing buildings came to represent the archetypal college experience has confounded many educators, scientists, and industrialists, who wondered why some of America’s most revolutionary institutions built libraries and academic halls in a style that seemed to oppose everything that was modern. Scholarship has not fully addressed the reasons why Collegiate Gothic buildings came to occupy so many American college campuses. Authors have not regarded the style in its own right, having its own history within the nineteenth-century’s dynamic developments in higher education, religion, politics, urban planning, and architecture. My dissertation evaluates these relationships by addressing the Collegiate Gothic’s first one hundred years on American campuses from 1806 to 1906.

Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression. Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others. I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation, focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text "speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1970) and The Adaptable Man (1965) address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual rgime that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference. The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman)

Thesis--Erlangen. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [iv]-vii).

Thesis--Bonn, 1973. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 409-439).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Hideous Progeny: Postcolonial Fiction and the Gothic Tradition explores the vexed relationship between postcolonial fiction and the Anglo-European-American Gothic mode. Gothic motifs figure abundantly in postcolonial works, but they are not always meant to be taken seriously; often they take a comic and ironic stance toward the subject matter. When horror does appear in these works, it is usually not situated in the abject Other (the pharmakos figure), but in the projecting mindset of the dominant culture. As the title Hideous Progeny implies, such postcolonial novels are the rebellious offspring of the Gothic canon; they can even be dubbed Frankenstein's monsters, created from the disjecta membra of the nineteenth-century Gothic tradition and reassembled into a newly vital, global Gothic literature. Or, to use a different metaphor, they function as inverted mirror images, as photographic negatives, of the nineteenth-century Gothic novel, neutralizing its familiar tropes with an injection of "magical realist" motifs from diverse cultural traditions. This study uses a psychoanalytic methodology to analyze the Gothic source echoes in selected novels by Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie. Through the lens of post-Freudian theorists Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Julia Kristeva, in particular, these novels will be depicted as Gothic--suspended between a haunted past and a technologically disorienting present--and also anti-Gothic. If the Gothic novel explored the unconscious anxieties of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western culture, as many have suggested, the postcolonial Gothic novel explores the unconscious anxieties of an emerging global culture in the late twentieth century. Unlike its Anglo-American precursor, however, postcolonial Gothic fiction does not recoil from the unknown, but embraces the "liminal" zone, finding in it both "tiger and lady," both terror and potential renewal.