| The modern novel and the concept of the uncanny are interrelated. While the novel focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary individuals, the uncanny produces anxiety through an interruption of the ordinary or familiar. As the six novels examined in the dissertation demonstrate, this mutual concern is one of the ways the uncanny haunts the modern novel.;Chapter One explores how the uncanny works in a particular narrative. In Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter and Vladimir Nabokov's Otchaianie [Despair], characters experience the uncanny when they are confronted with recurring visual elements. In The Bonesetter's Daughter, whenever a specific photograph appears, it marks a moment where stories of the Young family history come into conflict, revealing tensions between mothers and daughters, and the problems of immigration and translation that shape those tensions. Otchaianie grapples with the uncanny (false) double and whether the narrator's sight and narrative can be trusted. The idea of the double is complicated by questions of nationality and class differences between the narrator, Hermann, and his supposed double, Felix.;In Chapter Two, the uncanny's relationship to political narratives is made explicit through the question of how the uncanny works in the novel, especially in contrast with the official reports and documents produced by those in power. Ivan Bezdomny and the Master in Bulgakov's Master i Margarita [The Master and Margarita], and Coronel Moori Koenig and the narrator Tomas Eloy in Tomas Eloy Martinez's Santa Evita experience frustration and madness in the face of uncanny events that elude non-literary narration.;Chapter Three takes up the question of how the uncanny and modernity are inflected differently in texts that relate themselves to literary traditions beyond Europe. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cronica de una muerte anunciada [Chronicle of a Death Foretold] and Cheng Xiaoqing's Bieshu zhiguai ["The Ghost in the Villa"], the uncanny traces the lines between genres and illuminates the ways different peoples experience modernity and its inherent assumptions.;The uncanny is a constitutive element of the modern novel, an element that allows the genre to travel across the boundaries of linguistic and literary traditions. |
