Thesiss

The titular “House” from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1851 work The House of the Seven Gables is not just one house: it is an old edifice where the characters live, an intertwined family “house” of the Pyncheons and Maules, the plants and animals who live there alongside the humans, th…

The works of Latin ecclesiastical architecture of the 13th and 14th centuries at the periphery of Gothic geography in the eastern Mediterranean have been thought to be provincial. The party line is that the Gothic system developed in France, and shortly thereafter appeared in En…

I aim to make an important contribution to academic discussion of the modes of women's presence in the literatures of modernity, by approaching documentary texts and fictions describing impoverished women, from the perspective of consumption and phantasmagoric cultures. Cultural…

At the beginnings of the Gothic, in the eighteenth century, there was an anxiety or taboo surrounding consumption and appetite for the Gothic text itself and for the excessive and sensational themes that the Gothic discussed. The female body, becoming a commodity in society, was…

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. De…

Orphans of British Fiction, 1880-1911 Abstract William David Floyd Orphans of British Fiction, 1880-1911 focuses on the depiction of orphans in genre fiction of the Victorian fin-de-siecle. The overwhelming majority of criticism focusing on orphans centers particularly on the fo…

Intimate Antagonists: British Images of the Balkans, 1853-1914, explores the impact of the Eastern Question on the formation of British stereotypes about the Balkans, seeking to explain how the Balkans came to be seen as a disgrace to Europe. It advances the previous studies on …

This dissertation explores the link between a uniquely American gothic literary tradition and the establishment of American subjectivity and nationhood. Filled with virginal maidens fleeing lascivious patriarchs through haunted castles, dungeons, and subterranean passages, the B…

The lengthy Victorian period, extending from 1832 until 1901, was a time of cultural turmoil. New scientific discoveries were being made daily, and Christianity was forced to deal with issues of Darwinism, occultism, and growing disbelief in God. By the start of the fin de siècl…

The long nineteenth century was characterized by advances in medical, biological and technological knowledge that often complicated definitions of human life and blurred the lines between life and death. These changes impacted both beliefs and practices surrounding the human bod…

This dissertation explores the literary relationship between Ann Radcliffe’s late eighteenth-century heroine-centered novels and Jane Austen’s early nineteenth-century Gothic parodies, Northanger Abbey and Emma. Within this framework, it argues that, contrary to scholarly consen…

Holy Stitches, Batman, or, Performative Villainy in Gothic/am is an interdisciplinary examination of gothic affect and deviant fashion in the narrative construction of villainy. It asks not just what a villain looks like, but what it means to look like a villain. A villain is a …

This thesis examines the haunted house trope in contemporary American Southern Gothic literature, specifically with regards to Mormama by Kit Reed and Little Sister Death by William Gay. I examine a brief history of the Southern Gothic to establish how the genre has moved into c…

This dissertation examines the genre of the author-published familiar letter to consider the ways in which people come to understand themselves as part of a public, and as actors who might affect the shape of that public. Chapter 1, on Alexander Pope’s Mr. Pope’s Literary Corres…

This study examined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which foreshadows the Victorian period, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which reflects on it. The two novels are both monster stories that share many similarities, including themes of creativity and morality. However…

This dissertation argues that over the course of the long nineteenth century, Gothic antagonists moved from supernatural but disembodied beings into more physically monstrous entities. The shift to monster follows traceable lines as the Gothic monster drifted from beings of terr…

This dissertation defines a new genre called Digital Gothic, a cousin to the classic literary genre of Gothic, which revises the classic Gothic narrative method and aesthetic while retaining the genre’s typical aims of transgression, anxiety, and fear. In this new genre, technol…

While using feminist, historical, and some Marxist focus, this thesis evaluates the trajectory of Gothic heroines beginning shortly after the French Revolution and ending in the late nineteenth century. This trajectory will be analyzed through a Gothic heroine’s access to power …

This thesis investigates the distinction between terror and horror that Robert Hume first established in his 1969 article on categories of the gothic novel, a distinction that I redefine as a scholar working after the #Metoo movement and broader cultural recognition of the terro…