Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

In this dissertation, I draw on folkloristics, feminist and queer scholarship, and narrative theory to propose an interdisciplinary understanding of the Gothic literary aesthetic that hinges on its folkloric debt, particularly its debt to faerie legends and fairy tales. I am interested in how folk narrative intertexts are used in nineteenth-century British literature to produce what we know as “the Gothic.” Notoriously difficult to define precisely, scholars have long settled for linking the Gothic to particular plots and motifs—in contrast, I argue that it is largely the connecting of a text to an unsettling, unexplainable folk past that produces the aesthetic/mode/feel that we now refer to as Gothic. It is no coincidence that the nineteenth-century rise of interest in folklore study and collection corresponds almost exactly to the creation of the first Gothic texts. The thoughtful use of folk narrative—so frequently the voice of the marginalized and forgotten—allows for an engagement with both history and the unknown, a questioning and subversion of constructed societal expectations (particularly with regard to gender and sexuality), and a probing of the deepest, darkest complexities of our selves.

Committee: Clare Simmons (Advisor); Ray Cashman (Advisor); Merrill Kaplan (Committee Member); Jill Galvan (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Folklore; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies