Date of Award

3-29-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Department of English

First Advisor

Katherine Ellison

Abstract

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 terror that women face in their everyday lives. “Terror” illustrates the sustained sensations produced in women’s lives as powerless and marginalized. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twenty-first-century women writers of the gothic, including Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, depict female characters who overcome terror through domestic, scientific and medical, familial, experiential, cultural, and academic education. Linking recent feminist recuperations of the gothic to foundational conversations about gender in the genre, this thesis expands the idea of education as a defense from terror and argues that the gothic form was and is a kind of pedagogy.

Comments

Imported from Borland_ilstu_0092N_11917.pdf

DOI

https://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2021.20210719070603170676.95

Page Count

108

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