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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/31561 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Goss, Theodora Esther |
| Publisher | Boston University |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | This work is being made available in OpenBU by permission of its author, and is available for research purposes only. All rights are reserved to the author. |
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