Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2018, English

This thesis examines several distinct tropes of Anglo-Indian Colonial Gothic fiction: the haunted bungalow, the murderous servant, and the exotic Indian landscape. It situates the short stories of two women writers, Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin, within the context of the Victorian Gothic and nineteenth-century sociohistorical factors, such as the Mutiny of 1857, Darwinian theory, and racial science. Contrary to the Imperial Gothic, a genre dominated by male writers and based on the distorted experiences of British colonizers throughout the Empire, the Anglo-Indian Colonial Gothic is concerned with the lived colonial experience in British India. This study aims both to locate the subgenre within the literary history of the period and to expand the geography of the Victorian Gothic beyond its conventional settings on the mainland.

Committee: Heather Edwards (Advisor); Joseph McLaughlin (Other) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, History

This dissertation explores the intersection of political and ethnic conflict during the emperor Justinian's wars of reconquest through the figure and texts of Jordanes, the earliest barbarian voice to survive antiquity. Jordanes was ethnically Gothic - and yet he also claimed a Roman identity. Writing from Constantinople in 551, he penned two Latin histories on the Gothic and Roman pasts respectively. Crucially, Jordanes wrote while Goths and Romans clashed in the imperial war to reclaim the Italian homeland that had been under Gothic rule since 493. That a Roman Goth wrote about Goths while Rome was at war with Goths is significant and has no analogue in the ancient record. I argue that it was precisely this conflict which prompted Jordanes' historical inquiry. Jordanes, though, has long been considered a mere copyist, and seldom treated as an historian with ideas of his own. And the few scholars who have treated Jordanes as an original author have dampened the significance of his Gothicness by arguing that barbarian ethnicities were evanescent and subsumed by the gravity of a Roman political identity. They hold that Jordanes was simply a Roman who can tell us only about Roman things, and supported the Roman emperor in his war against the Goths. In this study, I argue that Jordanes must be appreciated as both Roman and Gothic. His texts reveal an individual negotiating his own dual identity in reaction to the acute crisis of the Gothic War. It is my contention that through his praise for both Goths and Romans, and his incorporation of contrived Gothic origins into the fold of Roman history, Jordanes sought to establish an inextricably entwined Roman-Gothic destiny in order to reconcile the two warring peoples with whom he personally identified. This project examines how Jordanes' multivalent identity informs his conception of both historic and contemporary relations between Goths and Romans, and thereby significantly enhances our ability to interpret Roman-Gothi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Timothy Gregory (Committee Co-Chair); Kristina Sessa (Committee Co-Chair); Anthony Kaldellis (Committee Member) Subjects: Ancient Civilizations; Ancient History; Ancient Languages; Classical Studies; Medieval History; Medieval Literature

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2024, Film

Max Kaplan's thesis explores what it takes to make a standout body horror film, from researching horror's gothic roots to making a compelling and unique horror to the daily tasks of a film director.

Committee: Lindsey Martin (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Fine Arts; Literature; Motion Pictures; Music; Performing Arts; Personal Relationships

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

At the crossroads of Middle America and the Appalachian Mountains, there is a small town called Hallowed, West Virginia, where the veil between worlds thins. Over 123 years, many different people of this town realize that this place that should be their safe haven is a breeding ground of horrors, all while combating the typical worries of rural America.

Committee: Patrick O'Keeffe (Committee Chair); Eric LeMay (Committee Member); Edmond Chang (Committee Member) Subjects: Folklore; Language Arts; Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, English

This thesis examines the intersections among gothic literature, empire, and contagion, and traces the emergence and evolution of a yet unexplored subgenre: the Imperial Gothic. Where early American Gothic narratives express anxieties about national stability and the republican subject, the Imperial Gothic explores anxieties that emerge when imperialism brings white Americans into contact with foreign commodities, environments, and bodies, ranging from foreign nationals, immigrants, and enslaved peoples, to Martians. It demonstrates how viral threats to the body correspond to the nationalist conception of foreign threats against the imagined white body politic. What emerges from this body of global and interplanetary literature is an “epidemiology of American imperialism.” While dark passageways, imprisoned heroines, and duplicitous patriarchal villains are staples of the classic Gothic genre, several additional tropes recur in the Imperial Gothic: trade and capitalism gone wrong, uncertain, or blurred identities, unknown deadly illnesses that spread through spatial contact zones, and the failure of both biological and national defense mechanisms. I explore these tropes through seven primary sources with publication dates ranging from 1799 to 2018. These works include: Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799), Herman Melville's Redburn (1849), Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Katherine Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969), and Ling Ma's Severance (2018).

Committee: Danielle C. Skeehan (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Epidemiology; Literature

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2021, Communication

This thesis examines the representation of women in the first season of the popular HBO television show Big Little Lies. Viewed through the lens of feminist ideological criticism, the show presents hegemonic ideologies about gender and women, and then erodes this hegemony in an indirectly feminist way. Four hegemonic forces or ideas are particularly relevant to the themes of the story: women as essentialized, women as catty, women as mothers, and representations of women as victims of domestic abuse. The show maintains roots in the genres of Suburban Gothic, Female Gothic, and Domestic Noir, but also seems to challenge and upset the conventions of these genres in some ways. Although the show does not completely discard stereotypes to challenge audience understandings of women, it does erode them and invites viewers to renegotiate ideas about women and how they relate to one another.

Committee: Sheryl Cunningham (Advisor); Catherine Waggoner (Committee Member); Darin Keesing (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Womens Studies

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

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, English/Literature

The Gothic has become a mode of transforming reality according to the writers' and the audiences' imagination through the reproduction of hellish landscapes and nightmarish characters and occurrences. It has also been used though to address concerns and criticize authoritarian and power relations between citizens and the State. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass are stories written during the second part of the 19th century and use distinct Gothic elements to comment on the political situation in England as well as the power of language from a child's perspective. Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth on the other hand uses Gothic horror and escapism to demonstrate the monstrosities of fascism and underline the importance of revolt and resistance against State oppression. This thesis will be primarily concerned with Alice and Ofelia as Gothic protagonists that become agents of revolt against their respective states of oppression through the lens of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. I will examine how language and escapism are used as tools by the literary creators to depict resistance against the Law and societal pressure; I also aim to demonstrate how the young protagonists themselves refuse to comply with the authoritarian methods used against them by the adult representatives of Power.

Committee: Piya Pal-Lapinski (Committee Chair); Kimberly Coates (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Cinematography; Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Literature; Philosophy; Political Science

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2013, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt is a novel that explores the conditions of detachment and anomie that are represented by a group of six students at an eastern private college. This tale of murder and concealment, combined with a lack of remorse and redemption, is far from the traditional, coming-of-age school novel. I argue that The Secret History participates in the gothic-postmodern literary genre, even though it bears the trappings of other genres. Reading this novel through a gothic-postmodern lens reveals that this work is an exaggeration, by way of the charged gothic atmosphere, of the tendencies of detachment and anomie that are said to occur more frequently in postmodern society. This novel is a critique of the negative potential of postmodern society, and it provides a means of coping with, and mastering, the fears and anxieties inherent in postmodern society.

Committee: Frederick Karem PhD (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard PhD (Committee Member); James Marino PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Theatre

For a period of approximately fifty years in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British stage was dominated by Gothic drama. Like the Gothic novels whose popularity flourished in the same historical moment, Gothic drama was characterized by its attempt to evoke an atmosphere of mystery, suspense, and terror through the employment of any combination of particular appurtenances: foreboding medieval landscapes; ruined Gothic castles riddled with hidden chambers; a tormented, menacing, yet engaging villain; an innocent, "Enlightened" maiden who is the subject of his advances; an ineffectual if not emasculated hero; a secret whose truth has critical ramifications on the present. Perhaps most commonly associated with the term “Gothic” is the implicit or explicit presence of the supernatural. However, Gothic drama in its original form did not necessitate supernatural manifestations. What, therefore, inspired Gothic playwrights to defy the threat of censorship and test the public's willingness to suspend its disbelief by persistently conjuring such entities upon London's stages? Gothic drama, obsessed with death and the unknown, originated and attained the height of its importance and popularity in Britain in a moment marked by tremendous external and internal pressures, an unprecedented string of social developments, and scientific and industrial innovations. These forces challenged, if not threatened, perceptions of the individual, collective, and political body. It is the contention of this dissertation that supernatural figures in Gothic drama, in each of their principle iterations – ghosts, magicians, and monsters - were literary devices by which corporeality could be safely explored in a time of tumultuous change and uncertainty in Britain. Gothic ghosts became signifiers of bodies of literature, political bodies, and female corporeality. Where ghosts are memories, Gothic magicians represented individuals who manipulate memory, in essence making (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lesley Ferris PhD (Advisor); Beth Kattelman PhD (Committee Member); Virginia Cope PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Theater

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1982, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2024, English

Within the Gothic genre, most books incorporate visible specters or embodied monsters. Authors who produced monsters most often came from marginalized groups within their cultural contexts: Bram Stoker was Irish and Mary Shelley was a woman. Marginalized authors were best equipped to produce monster stories since the body of the monster embodies and enacts the author's personal and the wider culture's anxieties. Monsters remain relevant due to their adaptability to expressing and embodying new anxieties in new eras, independent of the author's original anxieties written into the monster. Monster Theory posits that the body of the monster represents and exhibits the larger culture's fears, desires, and values, and describes permissible and transgressive behaviors in order to teach and control the community. This paper, using Monster Theory to analyze the monster's body, examines the two most famous Gothic monsters, Dracula and Frankenstein's Creature, to see where anxieties are enacted and destroyed. Bram Stoker encodes anxieties of female sexuality, queerness, recolonization, and political tensions over Irish Home Rule within Dracula's, the vampire bella's and Lucy's bodies. The violent death of the vampires are attempts to reinforce English middle-class hegemony against the sexual and invading force of Dracula. Mary Shelley explores her anxieties about child- and parenthood, creation and death, knowledge in isolation, and failure of genius within the creation, growth, and death of the Creature. The Creature's offer to live in harmony with mankind and his extratextual death demonstrates Shelley's desire to accept her anxiety in order to de-threaten it. This research has implications for further study in other monster stories as well as asks pertinent questions about the nature and function of monsters within the cultural psyche.

Committee: Rebecca Potter (Advisor); Laura Vorachek (Committee Member); Miriamne Krummel (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation is a series of epistolary devotional poems expressing the similarities between romantic and religious fixation, as well as the complexities of being a woman in a distinct American subculture of a college community affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The accompanying essay argues that the artistic mediums of the devotional and gothic can counteract the literary sterility that is a side effect of unrestrained postmodernism.

Committee: Mark Halliday (Committee Chair); Sarah Beth (Committee Member); Patrick O'Keeffe (Committee Member); Linda Zionkowski (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Arts and Sciences: English

The Gothic is a genre that fixates on, and represents, the blurring of boundaries of such dualities as self/other, past/present, male/female, life/death, visible/invisible, subject/object, and familiar/strange. Focusing on the ambiguities caused by these blurred boundaries, Haunting the Female Body reads the Gothic not only as a genre but as a lens, or system of reading, that reveals otherwise invisible cultural truths, remnants, and repressions buried in literature or other forms of narrative. Building on Derrida's concepts of hauntology, spectrality, and the trace, I apply the Gothic lens to different texts written by, and about, women since 1960. In all my readings, I seek to confront the ghosts repressed in these texts and resurrect that which has otherwise been buried or forgotten in culture. I first explore Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, seeking a deeper understanding of how patriarchal society limits women's identities, and how the unlived lives that societal limitation precludes end up haunting the protagonist, Esther Greenwood. Next, I look at Toni Morrison's Beloved, and how the women's bodies in that story become sites for the inscription of slavery; even Denver and Beloved, who did not experience slavery firsthand, seem to inherit the traumas from their mother and grandmother—traumas manifested as ghosts that haunt their very bodies. While the first two chapters of my dissertation read texts that are frequently classified as Gothic, my next two chapters show how the Gothic lens can be used to read contemporary texts that have not yet been identified as Gothic, but which nonetheless overflow with Gothic conventions. As my third chapter argues, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), is a novel in which the Gothic lens offers the most appropriate and useful way to analyze the text's exploration of such themes of diasporic literature as the impossibility of defining identity and the haunting influence of the past. Finally, in taking invisibility as its (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tamar Heller Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jennifer Glaser Ph.D. (Committee Member); Beth Ash Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2024, Musicology

The soundscapes of late-eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth-century France were acutely informed by years of political, social, and imperial upheaval and violence. In the decades following the Revolution of 1789, musical instruments sonified political instability and the goals of military conquest. In France, the lines between concert hall, festival ground, and battlefield blurred as a process of organological expansion and ensemble integration began. The nineteenth-century Romantic orchestra which emerged by 1830 was not merely a continuation of eighteenth-century orchestrational practice, but a distinctly French creation that reflected a turbulent, increasingly-militarized national landscape. This dissertation seeks to understand what such an ensemble, and its several component instrumental groups, meant and could do. Musicologists have recently turned to examining the meaning behind instrumental ensembles of this period, paying particular attention to issues of instrumentation, affect, and timbre. My interest in the history and politics of organology and timbre is similarly granular: I suggest that individual instruments carry distinct historical, cultural, and political associations, and that we can begin to understand the social, political, and military history of France between 1789 and 1869 by examining the instruments that animated the nation's major musical genres. I am especially interested in the orchestra's power as a national political collective, its function as a type of sonic weaponry, and its carrying of the sonic markers of empire. By examining the intersections between sound, power, politics, orchestration, warfare, and trauma, my project takes us back in time to the moment when composers such as Hector Berlioz and his contemporaries first deployed sound as a weapon, ushering in cultures of auditory violence that resonated through the following centuries. As I will show, nineteenth-century instruments could be deployed as weapons, just a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Francesca Brittan (Committee Chair); Peter Shulman (Committee Member); Susan McClary (Committee Member); Daniel Goldmark (Committee Member) Subjects: European History; History; Military History; Music; Performing Arts; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

Reading a ghostly company of lyric and epic poetry, treatises on aesthetics and poetics, manuals of technical prosody, and works of occult speculation across one and a half centuries, "The Phantoms of a Thousand Hours" argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and poetic theorists seize on the ghost as the inchoate form of poetry itself. Beginning in the pious meditations of the eighteenth-century "Graveyard School," these writers spectralize the operations of the poem and fashion poetic structures into chambers of vigil where the ghost might be awaited and encountered. Alive to the recursive directions of contemporary historical poetics, this study challenges the emerging scholarly consensus on the ghost in the long nineteenth century as either a creature of fiction, born almost coeval with the novel in the work of Defoe, or a residual form, a remainder from folklore and oral balladry that glides uncertainly into Gothic's set dressing. Rather, just as poets envisioned their craft as instinct with ghostly measures, rhythms, and pauses, occult writers from antiquaries to Spiritualists substantialized and realized the ghost through the opaque lyricism and manifest technique of poetry. Accepting neoformalism's sound insistence on the historicity of form itself, my work nonetheless eschews New Formalism's frequent dismissal of the specter from the spectral: even the most evanescent, technical traces of the ghost in the poetry of the long nineteenth century recall and reflect living structures of preternatural belief and occult vision. Like Shelley in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," these poets "sought for ghosts," and, if they were "not heard" and "saw them not," they could yet take solace in "the phantoms of a thousand hours," of the myriad ideal visions of poetry's ghosts across a long Graveyard Century. Across the Graveyard Century spanning from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy, this study argues that the ghost haunts poetry's sense of its own form precisely (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jill Galvan (Committee Co-Chair); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Hannibal Hamlin (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Literature

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2020, English

1950's author, Shirley Jackson, wrote of the daily housewoman's life with a Gothic turn. Beginning with domestic life magazines and later extending her works to the international press, Jackson wrote of the familiar and sometimes welcoming image of domesticity in a way that demonstrates the complex and ambiguous relationship women hold with their domestic roles. Though for some her writing inspired the breaking away from the housewife image, for many it brought a desire to embrace the housewife identity with writings that shared their experiences and made light of their domestic roles. Feminist readers debated whether women could truly be happy in these domestic roles or if the attempt to make light of the household duties was a denial of the limitations placed on them by a patriarchy. In Jackson's writing, there is a combination of support for the agentic housewife and the belief that domesticity brought personal destruction. Through this essay, it is shown how Jackson's literature, including her penultimate work, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, provides insight into the historical questioning behind the domestic woman, simultaneously showing the positive and negative components of domestic life.

Committee: Unknown (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Gender Studies; Literature; Modern Literature; Womens Studies

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2021, English

Reading Dracula, you are given characters who show personalities which a modern reader would deem strong and agentic qualities, but the men in Dracula and perhaps Stoker himself, do not seem to think that way. The venom of the vampire is like a parasite, making these women more “masculine” but also sickly and animalistic. They are turned into monsters which in the end must die, as with Lucy, or be cleansed like Mina, likely out of commentary on the types of equality desired by the New Woman and the stereotypes created for these women. Dracula made the vampire popular and created a character which is memorialized even today, but it is flawed in more ways than one, the villainization and victimization being such a flaw. As a response, Elizabeth Kostova commented on these flaws. The Historian is a completely different story, but the villain is mostly the same. He has the same origins and the name at least, but this Dracula doesn't care about who he hunts and really, he is more of an intellectual monster than an animalistic one. The women are not the ones being attacked by the author for their mixed masculinity and femininity; they are free to be just people living in their own times and reaping the benefits of the feminist progression they are existing with. The Historian uses adaptation to let these women act in such a way while connecting to a story of old that worked against persons such as the new woman. The thesis discusses how adaptations, such as The Historian, have the power to progress classic stories into a contemporary frame, vampire stories having an increased opportunity due to the immortality of the characters at hand, and demonstrate the shift in society and feminism through the generations. Through The Historian, such a progressive inter-textual conversation is shown: it progresses Dracula into a contemporary context that speaks to a westernized concept of feminist progression allowing for the women to be further removed from villainization.

Committee: Michael Mattison (Advisor); Scot Hinson (Committee Member); Brooke Wagner (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Folklore; Gender Studies; Literature; Modern Literature; Womens Studies

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2019, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

While critics and authors alike have deemed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary rake figure as a “monster” and a “devil,” scholars have rarely drawn the same connections between monsters to rakes. Even as critics have decidedly characterized iconic monsters like Victor Frankenstein and Dracula as rapists or seducers, they oftentimes do not make the distinction that these literary monsters originated from the image of the rake. However, the rake and the monster share overarching characteristics, particularly in the inherent qualities their respective authors attribute to them, which shape the way they treat women and offspring. A side-by-side comparison between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rakes of romantic British literature and the nineteenth-century monsters of British Gothic literature exposes similarities in composition and characterization coupled with underlying patriarchal authority. From these similarities, I assert that the literary rake depicted throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature evolves into the literary monster depicted in nineteenth-century Gothic novels. This monster reveals the true barbarianism of the rake by transforming his physiognomy from that of a wealthy aristocrat to that of a grotesque breeder of threatening monsters, underscoring the threat of patriarchal authority which rakes continually convey over their female counterparts and debunking the eighteenth-century misinterpretation “that a reformed rake makes the best husband” (Richardson 36).

Committee: Rachel Carnell Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Frederick Karem Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gary Dyer Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Language Arts; Literature

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2019, English

This work endeavors to explore the various movements of American Gothic by presenting an original narrative that represents key facets of each movement. Various authors and subgenres are mentioned throughout via text boxes containing annotative notes. These annotations are intended to enhance reader understanding of the American Gothic genre by familiarizing them with the stylistic conventions common to key authors and famous works of the genre. The story itself is broken up into seven sections, each distinct with regard to style and content while maintaining a cohesive narrative with a unified plot. As the readers progress through the plot, they will also progress chronologically through the history of American Gothic. from the earliest work of Charles Brockden Brown up to the Postmodern style of Mark Danielewski.

Committee: Bryan Bardine (Committee Chair); Steven Wilhoit (Committee Member); Chris Burnside (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature