School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemOtherness and Ambiguity: Coding Difference in British Gothic and Sensation Novels( 2020)This thesis reads British gothic and sensation novels through their historical contexts, examining Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) through the themes of cultural and social transgression, examining how transgressive experiences of religion, gender, sexuality, race, and class are registered in these novels through coded rather than explicit modes of representation. My analysis illuminates these novels' indirect engagement with contemporary discourses – about Catholicism, Orientalism, femininity, sodomy, tribadism, and domestic violence – through the utilisation of similar modes of language and theme. With this combination of literary and historical analysis, I examine how these texts reflect change across time and genre. In particular, I focus on gothic uses of excess and violence in The Monk and Zofloya, and how this facilitates the inclusion of other, more coded, transgressions and marginalised cultural Others in the texts. I then apply the same framework to a central text of the sensation genre, The Woman in White. By analysing this novel alongside its gothic forebears, I examine the different approaches taken by these genres and their authors to the same cultural issues, as well as how they are strikingly similar, in order to unpack the changes caused by shifts in setting and plot from the distant and outlandish, to the familiar, domestic, and contemporary. The thesis utilises a non-binarist approach to analysis that allows for contradiction and inconclusiveness, resisting a critical history which relies on false or restrictive methods of classification and opposition. I emphasise the complexities of the novels, particularly within the full context of cultural debates, rather than attempting to define them as radical or conservative on particular social issues. By allowing the texts to stand within their contradictions, the thesis seeks to illuminate how we can gain a greater understanding of both text and history, and how these dynamic and powerful texts resist categorisation.