Gothic politics: Imperialism and race in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel

This thesis examines racial and imperial tensions in Gothic fiction. In particular, it considers how contested colonial histories and the instability of text combine to produce ambiguous, often contradictory, representations of race and imperialism in the Gothic. What emerges from this approach is a vision of the Gothic as simultaneously promoting and expressing reservations about racial prejudice and imperial domination, with no recourse to a dialectical synthesis capable of smoothing out this friction. In the first chapter, I contextualize the Gothic by advocating a shift from traditional psychoanalytic interpretations of the genre toward what is deemed a "materialist" reading. In the second chapter, I look at xenophobia in mid nineteenth-century England as depicted in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. In the third chapter, I explore the topic of race and miscegenation in Bram Stoker's Dracula. The novel is careful to point out that it is a Balkan vampire, of mixed race ancestry, who lasciviously penetrates the flesh of English women in order to propagate a new legion of vampires in England. Racial difference and racial mixing is thus literally rendered monstrous. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...