Gothicism is the primary feature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction, and it is his skill in elevating Gothicism to the level of high art which makes him a great artist. Gothic elements are divided into six categories: Objects, Beings, Mental States, Practices and Actions, Architecture and Places, and Nature. Some devices from these six categories are documented in three of Hawthorne's stories ("Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil," and "Ethan Brown") and three of his romances (The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun). The identification of 142 instances of Hawthorne's use of Gothic elements in the above works demonstrates that Hawthorne is fundamentally a Gothic writer.

No description available.

No description available.

This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.

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.

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

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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-231). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

No description available.

No description available.