Bielefeld, University, Diss., 2002.

No description available.

Univ., Diss.--Cambridge. / Bibliography S. 186 - 200.

論文提要內容： 本篇論文旨在探討安•瑞克麗芙之《烏多夫堡秘辛》中十八世紀女性如何藉改造自身特質，逆轉身處不平等的劣勢。同時並引用瑪麗•烏爾史東考夫特的自由女性主義來分析小說文本。在小說中，瑞氏藉由女主角的冒險故事來剖析十八世紀的女性如何在父權社會中抗拒屈從，堅持自我存在的價值和追尋個人幸福。 本論文共分為五章。第一章概述瑞氏生平背景、作品特性、本小說之寫作背景、古今評論對本小說之評價，以及分析本文所應用的理論。第二章與第三章側重瑞氏對十八世紀之「感性」（sensibility）的分析。註1瑞氏在小說中以許多篇幅描寫「感性」對當時女性的深遠影響，並探討其正、反兩面的價值。有鑑於此，第二章討論瑞氏對「感性」強化女性膚淺、非理性等負面特質的批判。第三章探討瑞氏如何運用「感性」中知性、理性、利他三種正面價值來改變女性軟弱無能的特質。第四章乃瑞氏在小說中對於女權和女性獨立自主觀點之分析。最後一章為結論兼及小說寫作和瑞氏作品的貢獻。 / Abstract In The Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe describes the story of a young, middle-class woman. She illustrates how the innocent, sensitive protagonist fights against oppression, defends her value and finds her own happiness in the male dominated world. By describing the protagonist’s opposition to subordination, Radcliffe points out the necessity of changing women’s manners. The writer of this thesis explores Radcliffe’s concern with the social inferiority of women in The Mysteries of Udolpho. The writer also applies Mary Wollstonecraft’s liberal feminist thought in her discussion of Radcliffe. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction. It includes Ann Radcliffe and her works, the critical response, the theory employed in the textual analysis, namely Wollstonecraft’s liberal feminist thought and an overview of the eighteenth-century sensibility. The second chapter focuses on Radcliffe’s attack of the false sensibility and how it distorts the nature of women. The third chapter centers on the virtuous sensibility and how it functions as the power to reverse women’s social inferiority. In the fourth chapter, the stress will be laid upon issues of marriage, property and the meaning of independent women. The concluding chapter discusses the contribution of Radcliffe as novelist.

Stuttgart, Universiẗat, Diss., 2008.

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s role as the most significant precursor to the Gothic author in Britain, suggesting that Shakespeare used the same literary conventions that Gothic writers embraced as they struggled to create a new subgenre of the novel. By borrowing from Shakespeare’s canon, these novelists aimed to persuade readers and critics that rather than undermining the novel’s emergent, still unassured status as an acceptable literary genre, the nontraditional aspects of their works paid homage to Shakespeare’s imaginative vision. Gothic novelists thereby legitimized their attempts at literary expression. Despite these efforts, Gothic writers did not instantly achieve the type of acceptance or admiration that they sought. The Gothic novel has consistently been viewed as a monstrous, immature literary form—either a poor experiment in the history of the novel or a guilty pleasure for those who might choose to read or to write works that fit within this mode. Writers of Gothic fictions often claim that their works emulate Shakespeare’s dramatic pathos, but they do not acknowledge that the playwright also had to navigate similar opposition to his own creative expression. While early Gothic novelists had to contend with skeptical readers and reviewers, Shakespeare had to negotiate the religious, political, and ideological limitations that members of the court, the church, and the patronage system imposed upon his craft. Interestingly, Shakespeare often succeeded in circumventing these limitations by employing the literary techniques and topoi that we recognize today as trademarks of Gothic fiction—spectacle, sublime, sepulcher, and the supernatural. Each of these concepts expresses subversive intentions toward authoritative power. For Shakespeare and the Gothic novelists, the dramatic potential of these elements corresponds directly to their ability to target the sociocultural fears and anxieties of their audience; the results are works that frighten as well as amuse. As my dissertation will show, these authors use similar imagery to surreptitiously challenge the authority figures and institutions that sought to prescribe what makes a work of fiction socially acceptable or worthy of critical acclaim.

This dissertation investigates how three significant nineteenth-century American female writers strategically transform a central Gothic motif – the virtuous heroine pursued by a villain who lusts for sexual and socioeconomic power – to tell new stories about gendered bodies and the erotic relations between them. Established in the genre-defining British Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, this popular motif endured throughout the nineteenth century in texts written and read on both sides of the Atlantic. This project examines understudied texts by E.D.E.N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, and Julia Ward Howe that exhibit a striking intertextual awareness of the motif, reformulating it to critique the era’s marital and inheritance practices that enable and reinforce persistent gender inequities. These texts presciently recognize the performative nature of gender, centering on protagonists that move fluidly between genders with strategic choices about dress, speech, and social roles. By examining these texts together, this project shows that they anticipate the insights of contemporary feminist and queer theory as their protagonists deliberately calculate how to blend traditionally gendered behaviors and transform sexual threats into situations in which they can either consensually participate or cleverly elude. Chapter One argues that E. D. E. N. Southworth’s popular serial novel The Hidden Hand (1859) rewrites the narrative pattern that situates Gothic heroines as vulnerable to rape by positioning its heroine as aware of her fictional status and therefore capable of using her metafictional knowledge to reconfigure sexually threatening situations. Chapter Two examines how Louisa May Alcott’s sensation tale A Long, Fatal Love Chase (1866) blends traditionally male and female Gothic narratives to cast its heroine as a female Faust figure whose desperate desire for freedom leads her to enter naively into a bigamous partnership with a Mephistophelean man whose relentless pursuit ultimately causes her death. Chapter Three contends that Julia Ward Howe’s recently recovered manuscript The Hermaphrodite (1848) situates its ambiguously sexed but male-identifying protagonist as a Gothic “heroine” who employs unconventional strategies to cope with conventional threats to his physical and financial autonomy and rejects all interpersonal bonds because of the gendered restrictions they impose upon him. / 2019-07-31T00:00:00Z

"Uncanny Affects" argues, broadly, that the gothic novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries models a critical ethics of reading. By examining recurrent scenes of reading and interpretation in key gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), I surmise that this critical ethics posits affect, or the experience of generalized emotion, as central to the act of interpretation. I contend that this gothic critical ethics influences the concurrent development of the discipline of literary criticism. By reading these key gothic novels and then tracking their broader influence on Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, I make a case for the significance of a gothic epistemology to the development of literary criticism in British and American universities from the nineteenth century onward. A focus on the gothic novel's critically inclined characters, including antiquarians and detectives, enables me to read gothic novels and other gothically-inflected writing for what they can tell us about the practice of interpretation, particularly as that practice becomes institutionalized and professionalized. Thus I track the gothic mode's tendency toward affective reading in relation to ideas of professionalization, which values critical detachment or disinterestedness in interpretation. As a result, interpretation in the gothic mode can seem too emotional or "creative" for a typically professional practice. Reading the gothic as such links it to modern discussions about interpretive practices such as close reading, paranoid and reparative reading, and surface reading. Perhaps more importantly, reading the gothic alongside these new discussions on critical ethics allows us to think through the place of affect and pleasure in an ethical critical practice. Ultimately, examining how gothic texts formulate a gothic mode or philosophy of reading demonstrates the real ubiquity this mode has achieved in the critical setting, a ubiquity that continues to shape and influence our conceptions of scholarly and critical reading even today. / text

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2006

Issued also as Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University.