Anxieties of audience: A study of gendered Gothic reception

The persistent popularity of what we now call Gothic begs the questions: whose taste is shaped, how is it shaped, and to what extent is that taste indicative of a pure aesthetic? These aesthetic questions further lead us to similarly puzzling queries about the current state of Gothic itself: in recent years, many scholars have proposed that, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, science fiction displaces Gothic's rote. To get at the heart of the values and aesthetics that support such claims is a key task of this dissertation.; This project seeks not simply to probe the anxieties of audiences dead for multiple centuries but rather to use the analyses of Romantic-era Gothic as a springboard into the aesthetic responses to contemporary readers and viewers, contextualizing the study around gender issues long associated with the Gothic tradition. The aesthetics of reception reveal a complex matrix of gender politics not only in perceptions of biological gender of readers but also in the critical tools used for gendering texts as male or female. Thus, this dissertation examines the extent to which different types of aesthetics influence reception of Gothic texts along critical divisions of gender.