Objects, People, and Landscapes of Terror: Considering the Sublime through the Gothic Mode in Late 19th Century Novels

In this master’s thesis, I explore how theories of the sublime are negotiated in three Victorian novels and how they relate to issues of foreignness and gender in the nineteenth century. The introduction provides an overview of each chapter and outlines key theorists and theories of the sublime pertinent to my argument. My first chapter includes an analysis of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) to show how Collins presents horror and terror as terms that bleed into and out of one another but are viewed in Victorian society as experiences meant for specific times and places. Chapter two involves a close reading of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) to examine how the Jewish male is an agent for prompting females to experience terror as sublimity. In the last chapter, I investigate Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to show how Dracula tries to assert a perverse sublimity through vampirism which must be corrected by the end of the novel for the British to restore their authority over land and body. My conclusion links the three texts together by presenting common themes and structures found in each work.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Porter, Kelly Ann

• Daniel Deronda

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/57121

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/57121