Browsing by Subject "Gothic"
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Item The City, the Housing and the Community Plan--Some Basic and Historical Considerations(University of Texas at Austin, 1942-10-08) Leipziger, HugoItem Disability and the gothic in southern women's literature(2022-01-28) Piwarski, Rachel (Rachel Ann), 1991-; Minich, Julie Avril, 1977-; Barrish, Phillip; Kafer, Alison; Cox, James H; Buenger, WalterDisability and the Gothic in Southern Women’s Writing connects intersectional disability studies to American literature. The gothic works of mid-twentieth century writers Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, ZZ Packer uncover how female writers strikingly subvert social expectations of normativity and propriety to resist narratives that favor white homogeneity by using a grotesque lens. Conventionally, the grotesque is often associated with disabled people, but I explore how the authors use this literary trope indiscriminately with all characters to reveal the difficulty of living with physical or mental differences in the respective regions they focus on in the South: rural communities, industrial towns, and the metropolis. I argue that disability remains at the heart of this literature because it uncovers cultural attitudes that embolden those in power to marginalize people outside of a straight, white, male, and able-bodied position in largely rural settings. To enact their subversion, these female writers use the gothic literary mode to communicate stories that reflect horror and history. This dissertation explores disability as it relates to mother-daughter relationships and institutionalization, the misfit other and harmful spectating in coming-of-age stories, and power dynamics in various social settings. Instead of casting disabled figures as the primary targets of this grotesque mode, I look to grotesque depictions of other abled-bodied characters within stories that center disability, where authors notably apply the grotesque to non-disabled characters. Using this tactic allows writers to illustrate that genuinely horrific traits can be found within the face of the oppressor.Item Domestic dangers : monstrous women in the 19th-century Gothic and contemporary horror film(2022-05-05) Gosse, Raelynn; Kornhaber, Donna, 1979-; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M. (Elizabeth Merle), 1964-; MacKay, Carol; Roche, DavidFrom bloody scream queens to seductive femmes fatales and cold-blooded murderesses, images of complex and multifaceted women abound in contemporary horror and 19th-century literature alike. My objective in Domestic Dangers is to reconceptualize the significance of monstrous female characters in the mid-Victorian Gothic and 21st-century horror film by focusing critical attention on interpretations of monstrosity informed by the domestic experience of women and the transformative nature of femininity. This transtemporal, trans-medial conversation illuminates and animates both bodies of work, revealing that the domestic actively and insidiously monsterizes female characters for failing to uphold impossible domestic expectations or transgressing patriarchal social mores. I intend to take seriously both the Gothic and contemporary horror, activating the power these genres hold to critique and reflect on current understandings of violent female characters and the interpretive value of horror-based imagery in the domestic space. Using feminist film and literary theory, monster studies, psychoanalytic concepts of abjection, and gaze theory, I argue that works by Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, Emma Tammi, Anna Biller, and Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer subvert expectations concerning the sanctity of the home and the viability of the family, revealing the domestic as prime breeding ground for the monstrous.Item Interview with the southern vampire : reviving a haunted history in contemporary film and television(2015-05) Austin, Katharine Griffin; Frick, Caroline; Fuller-Seeley, KathrynIt is difficult to imagine a time without vampires, a fixture of Western popular culture since the nineteenth century. The vampires of today, however, are a far cry from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker’s creation is a monster, a metaphor for all things feared by Victorian culture. Contemporary vampires, on the other hand, are increasingly depicted as marginalized figures striving for redemption and human connection. Within this shift from monster to social outcast, a peculiar trend has emerged: vampire fiction set in the American South that deliberately addresses the region's haunted history. As mythical beings, vampires often serve as mediators for an era's particular anxieties or fears. So why does current Western society need not just sympathetic vampires but sympathetic Southern ones? What particular concerns do these Southern vampires negotiate? And how does a Southern locale engender this purpose? To answer these questions, I first consider how such media engage with the Southern Gothic. Chapter one focuses on HBO's True Blood (2008-2014), examining how Southern vampire texts negotiate race and class structures and promote the possibility of a modern, integrated Southern society. Chapter two compares Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Neil Jordan, 1994) and The Originals (The CW, 2013-Present) to explore how Southern vampires mediate feelings of collective guilt and motivate (or avoid) reparation efforts. To understand not only the elements but also the cultural import of this regionalized media trend, I next extend these readings with an examination of audience reception. Chapter three focuses on viewers of The Originals, surveying the diversity of audience engagement with the series as well as identifying recurring trends within that diversity. In combining all three threads of analysis, I conclude that vampire texts set in the American South perform a complex and at times paradoxical function, promoting feelings of nostalgia for an imagined South as well as engendering processes of critical self-reflection.Item Multum in parvo : the miniature hours of Edith G. Rosenwald as woman’s devotional book and amulet(2013-05) Pietrowski, Emily Diane; Holladay, Joan A.The Hours of Edith G. Rosenwald (c.1340–80) is a small book of hours in the Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress. Despite unique iconography and luxurious illuminations, this manuscript has so far received little scholarly attention. This thesis analyzes the size and iconography of the Rosenwald Hours to suggest that it was designed for a specific owner and function. No surviving documentation gives evidence of ownership, yet the standard program of miniatures was changed to suit a specific audience. The manuscript’s iconographic program and stylistic treatment are here considered in the context of contemporary books made for women, particularly women of the royal court in Paris, to suggest a likely audience. One of only a few extant miniature books of hours, the Rosenwald Hours is a valuable tool for looking at the place of small manuscripts in medieval society. This thesis examines the physical size, the iconography, and the inclusion of saint portraits as indicators of a function beyond the standard devotional use. A case is made for the manuscript’s connection to pilgrimage and to protective amulets. Combined with the assessment of its iconography, this study suggests an owner and intended use for miniature books of hours that provides a new way to look at these manuscripts, from obscure Flemish examples to the famous Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux.Item Other gods, other powers : numinous horror in American literature(2018-04-27) Omidsalar, Alejandro; Houser, Heather; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Kevorkian, Martin; Taylor, Matthew A.The Gothic has literary criticism in an interpretive stranglehold. Despite their wide cultural and temporal sweep, studies of the Gothic mode depend almost uniformly on suspicious reading practices, frequently overlooking the supernatural ideas that initially animated the Gothic and other, lesser-known modes of horror. At the same time, the Gothic mode—especially in its American context—is entwined with Judeo-Christian moral positions and political-historical anxieties, ensuring a human-centered ontological outlook that maintains narrow parameters for what sorts of dark fiction are considered worthy of academic consideration. My dissertation, “Other Gods, Other Powers,” broadens the scholarly conversation about the literary macabre by mapping the evolution of numinous horror, a strain of American supernatural horror writing that imagines the divine in non-anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic ways, prioritizing pessimism, entropy, and negation over conventionally accepted, Judeo-Christian-influenced understandings of the divine. The numinous, a term denoting the experience of the divine as awesome or terrifying, is the aesthetic category that unifies the transhistorical scope of my dissertation, which runs from 1798 through 1988, covering works by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ben Hecht, Fred Chappell, and Thomas Ligotti. An alternative, markedly pessimistic tradition comes to the fore across these readings, contradicting popular understandings of American literature’s supposedly inherent optimism and humanism. Numinous horror narratives depict gods as malevolent, inscrutable, and alien; they re-imagine godhood as a state of omnipotent idiocy only accessible to people at the cost of their humanity. The horror in these works comes from the divine’s absolute inscrutability; the narration of each text must contend with an irremediable lack of knowledge, clarity, and certainty. My dissertation models a kind of reading that approaches a text’s underlying supernatural and metaphysical premises on their own terms, instead of reading them allegorically, symptomatically, or otherwise superstitiously. Pulling from philosophical, theological, and new materialist theoretical conversations, “Other Gods, Other Powers” opens up an oft-overlooked, philosophically rich body of writing to interdisciplinary inquiry by contributing to current conversations about alternative reading practices and genre fiction’s place in literary scholarshipItem Proximity to the divine : personal devotion at the Holy Graves in Strasbourg(2012-05) Bryant, Aleyna Michelle; Holladay, Joan A.; Smith, Jeffrey C.In this thesis I examine the Holy Grave monument located in the St. Catherine chapel of Strasbourg cathedral, erected by Bishop Berthold von Bucheck sometime between 1346 and 1348. This sculptural sarcophagus currently exists in fragmented form in the Musée de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame; only the four relief panels of the sleeping guardians, the gisant of Christ, and some fragments of the baldachin remain of the original monument. Scholars have been able to ascertain the placement and probable appearance of the Holy Grave based on traces of three lancet bays, wall paint, and bolt holes discovered along the west wall of the chapel during twentieth-century excavations. The numerous copies that the St. Catherine Holy Grave inspired throughout Strasbourg and the surrounding area attests to the significance of the monument within the larger Holy Grave tradition. The Strasbourg Holy Grave functioned liturgically as a prop used by the clergy to reenact the drama of the resurrection during Holy Week. I argue, however, that the monument's permanence, relative accessibility, and pathos-inspiring imagery suggest its use on a more frequent basis. Through its isolation of scenes from the biblical narrative and its visualization of complex mystical metaphors, the Holy Grave at Strasbourg cathedral--and thus also the numerous copies it inspired--reveals its use as an object for personal devotion, much like the group of Rhenish Andachtsbilder that also flourished at this time. The changing beliefs concerning Christ's Passion, the nature of the Eucharist, and the understanding of death and the afterlife are reflected in the style, iconography, and didactic message of the Holy Grave monument. The influence that the mendicant orders and Rhenish mystics had on the spiritual instruction of the laity in Strasbourg points to the understanding of this monument as a tool to aid the faithful in achieving union with God. The popularity of Holy Graves in and around Strasbourg ultimately illustrates the medieval desire for proximity to the divine. As the emphasis on Christ's suffering and death grew throughout the devotional practices of the fourteenth century, art forms like the Holy Grave monument at Strasbourg cathedral increasingly focused on engendering pathos in the medieval devout. The Strasbourg Holy Grave's liturgical, devotional, and anagogical functions coalesce to create a monument that's fundamental purpose consisted of aiding the faithful in their journey toward salvation.Item Tearing up the nun : Charlotte Brontë's gothic self-fashioning(2013-05) Sloan, Casey Lauren; MacKay, Carol HanberyThis report explores the ideological motivations behind Charlotte Brontë's inclusion of and alterations to gothic conventions in Villette (1853). By building on an account of the recent critical conversation concerning the conservative Enlightenment force of the gothic, this report seeks to explain the political significance of a specific, nineteenth-century mutation in the genre: Lucy Snowe as an experiment in the bourgeois paradigm. Lucy Snowe's sophisticated consciousness of genre manifests in her minute attention to dress, but the persistence of her personal gothic history means that Villette enacts political tension between individualistic "self-fashioning" and historical determinism as clashing models for the origin of identity.Item The Gothic sartorial : fashion and costume in novels from the long nineteenth century(2017-05) Sloan, Casey Lauren; MacKay, Carol Hanbury; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; Rudrappa, Sharmila; MacDuffie, Allen; Hutchison, ColemanThis dissertation asks why long-nineteenth-century British Gothic novels return again and again to women’s dress as a site of pain, imprisonment, and horror. Fashion theorists like Dani Cavallaro, Alexandra Warwick, and Joanna Entwistle argue that dress is a component of self inextricably linked to both intelligible public codes and to personal creation or expression. The mode that I call the “Gothic sartorial” imbues dress with negative affects like terror and anxiety to emphasize that the clothed individual perpetually balances between competing varieties of external force and internal holism. Authors working in this mode create these dichotomies using costume, dress which is ritualistic or traditional, and fashion, dress which is mutable and identifiably modern. Chapter One sets the stage for subsequent Victorian texts by explaining how the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), constructs a masculinist model of material historiography by assigning epistemological value to male-coded costume items. Chapter Two investigates how Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) updates the Gothic sartorial by threatening Lucy Snowe’s stalwart Protestant individualism with costume as well as fashion. Chapter Three shows how Wilkie Collins pushed back against stringent critics of women’s fashion by hinging the happy ending of The Woman in White (1859-60) on the heroines’ use of dress to establish supportive sororal communities. Such communities prove impossible in Chapter Four as Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham uses modern costume, her ruined wedding dress, to destabilize historical positivism and to erode the intergenerational links needed to establish continuity between the past and the present. Examining the Gothic sartorial in the long nineteenth century provides new perspectives on women’s dress for cultural studies and for feminist theory. Using the terminological trio of costume-dress-fashion allows us to see how authors conceived of dress as historically resonant, communally valued, and materially powerful. In addition, the Gothic sartorial elevates the agency of dress without implicitly casting its female wearers as patriarchally indoctrinated, reconciling formerly disparate strands of feminist thought. The texts chosen demonstrate the ability of the material world to determine events and even personal identity; when clothes haunt people, people become the possessed.