The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic

摘要

Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, hasdeveloped substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames theGothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having specialpsychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems withthese argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothicthat are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers.While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engagedwith theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and howit alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesisattempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre throughPierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textualconventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing andreading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discretehistoricised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought tobe performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for theliterary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice.The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies ofparticular moments in three separate Gothic fields.Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly StephenKing's It, Joyce Carol Oates' Mysteries of Winterthurn, and Toni Morrison's Beloved,facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. TheGothic text has its origins in 'lowbrow' popular culture, even as it sometimes aspiresto 'highbrow' literary performances.Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage adiscussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothictext, creating a distinct subjunctive 'world', and of the way that Gothics definethemselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley's TheDevil Rides Out, which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works bySusan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley'sdepiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as thisparticular field's metaphor of its own practice.Thirdly, New Zealand's underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue toexplore the Gothic's relationship with nation and national literature, and how thepractice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson's stories and his novella TheHangover, together with Janet Frame's A State of Siege are texts authored bycanonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although theirparticipation in popular genre has been little recognised.This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice,facilitated through the canniness of habitus.