PhD students

Mark Bennett

Title: From Libraries to Landscapes: Travel Writing and the Gothic, 1700-1797

My project examines the development of a relationship between the Eighteenth Century Gothic and the Imaginative Geographies produced and maintained within dominant traditions of tourism and travel-writing. In the process I observe the significance of the Picturesque movement in maintaining the Gothic imagination during the 1770s and 80s (when relatively few Gothic novels are published); draw attention to the work of relatively neglected Gothic writers, such as Charlotte Smith; and finally reappraise Ann Radcliffe’s oeuvre as a progressive intervention in the field of travel and travel-writing: completing the Gothic’s (re)location within a modern, enlightened, cultural imagination at the end of the Eighteenth Century.

Duncan Burnes

Title: The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Blurring the Boundaries

My project concerns the crystallisation of an adolescent age group through the medium of gothic readership, and how the tropes of gothic literature gradually came to be allied, and arguably transferred, to literature for children and adolescents. Evidence of children’s reading of gothic literature in the eighteenth century is not as sparing as might be expected, and in this light a reading of gothic tropes reveals considerable pertinent interest value to an adolescent audience which anecdotally implicitly comprises a large proportion of the reading audience, and not coincidentally frequently coincides with the age and class circumstances of gothic protagonists themselves.

Rosalind Crocker

Title: Modernity and the ‘Medical Man’: Neo-Victorian Doctor Figures at the Turn of the Millennium

This project looks at the figure of the ‘medical man’ in neo-Victorian fiction written around the turn of the millennium, examining the reciprocal relationship between the Nineteenth and Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries in the depictions of these doctors. I will interrogate the ways in which recent developments in clinical practice are transposed onto our reimaginations of the Nineteenth Century, and also which Victorian mythologies inform modern narratives about clinicians. My thesis explores a range of sources, including fiction, legislation, theory, and news media, to look at the complex relationships between past and present in this medical context.

Tasmin Crowther

Title: ‘(Re)presenting the Brontës: A Study of Female Representation Through Mirrors, Windows and Paintings in Five Brontë Novels’

The Brontës have been considered proto-feminist writers due to the way their adult works deal with the limitations of the female position in mid-nineteenth century society in ways that have been deemed rebellious or subversive. This thesis contributes to feminist studies on the Brontës by providing a nuanced understanding of the at times subversive but at other times more conventional ways they depicted women’s role in patriarchal society by arguing that a set of analogous images – mirrors, windows, and paintings – held a significant space in the Brontës’ literary imagination and were utilised to explore both the potential liberations and limitations for the female position and its representations.

Catherine Gadsby-Mace

Title: The Geographical Domestication of Gothic Fiction, 1800-1820

My research investigates the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century transition from foreign to domestic settings in the British Isles in Gothic fiction. I explore the social, political and religious contexts for this geographical change; including the rise of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin literature during and after the French Revolution, the burgeoning anxieties about liberty and freedom among the British population, and Protestant concerns surrounding the increase in Catholic sympathisers. My thesis is divided into four chapters which deal with the four British nations, analysing their individual Gothic literary output to assess what contemporary issues influenced their work.

Mary Going

Title: Judaism and the Gothic, 1790-1820

My research centres around representations of Judaism within Gothic literature of the 1790s and the early nineteenth century.  I am particularly interested in constructions of national and religious identities, or portrayals of the religious ‘other’, within Gothic fiction, as well as how this affects depictions of Jewish identities and communities. Key figures of interest include the mythical figure of the Wandering Jew and Shakespeare’s Shylock, who is consistently portrayed as an implicit inspiration for Jewish characters within the Gothic. By looking at the novels of traditional Gothic authors such as Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, and Charles Maturin alongside authors such as Charlotte Smith and George Walker, my research questions whether such portrayals are intrinsically anti-Semitic, or whether the Gothic instead allows for a more sympathetic perspective.

Catherine Greenwood

Title: Gothicising a Poetics of Displacement: Immigrants/Effects
My practice-based project takes its title from the steamer trunk my parents brought from Scotland to Canada, and ‘effects’ as belongings bearing traces of hame provide entry into a poetic narrative about the Scots diaspora and the unheimlich.  An eco-horror subtext gestures toward the impact of climate change on our earthly home – ‘effects’ in the sense of consequence. ‘Effects’ as aesthetic result is the touchstone for an inquiry into how Gothic poetry functions and by what literary heritage such works are haunted. A key aim is to identify a Gothic poetics and develop new forms in my own practice.

Kathleen Hudson

Title: Servant narratives and their impact on identity in early Gothic fiction

My research interrogates how the servant narratives found in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Gothic literature are part of an evolving British literary tradition.  This tradition explores servant narrative as both a subversive and confirming method of controlling identity constructs, both individually and in a broader social sense. The Gothic novels of Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Dacre, Shelley  and others draw from a literary tradition of servant narrative control going back to Shakespeare and closely linked with the development of the novel.  The persistence of this tradition suggests an understanding of identity as subjective, changeable, and a product of self-creation and class-transcending imagination.

Lauren Nixon

Title: A Women’s Gothic? : 1780 to 1820

My research explores the relationship between the female writers of the Gothic tradition, their depictions of gender and their relationship with their female readers in the late eighteenth century. The eighteenth century saw the development of a British middle class and in turn a significant increase of literacy amongst women. These newly literate women sought suitable entertainment and so the Gothic found not only a devoted audience, but also a vast number of authors to sustain it. Arguably, for the first time women were able to engage in a direct discourse: novels written by women, specifically to be read by women. My thesis explores how female readers and writers used the Gothic to define femininity and to what extent the Gothic was a ‘female sphere’.

Evangeline R Payne

Title: The Gothic Castle Space: Nineteenth Century British Gothic to Twentieth and Twenty First Century Nordic Noir

Daniel Southward

Title: The Book of Levi: Ouroboric Fiction and the Future of Metafiction.

My research looks at the role of the Gothic in investigating post-postmodern modes, specifically analysing how the genre can be employed in exploration of Vermuelen and van den Akker’s Metamodernism. This involves an analysis of the use of metafictional techniques, the search for sincerity, and the swing between modernist and postmodernist ideologies in contemporary Gothic fiction (from ~ 1990 onwards). I am particularly interested in the Gothic as a site for the exploration of these new critical landscapes, how an emergent neo-romanticism and a desire to be free of a postmodern ironic past which constantly returns to disrupt the present can be, and increasingly are, transposed onto atypical Gothic narratives.

Carly Stevenson

Title: Gothic Keats

As the title suggests, my research examines the influence of the Gothic on John Keats. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Keats’s engagement with the Gothic was informed by his medical knowledge of the body. As such, my thesis is loosely structured around the senses.

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