![]() © 2013 Clayton Carlyle Tarr All Rights Reserved THE FORCE OF A FRAME: NARRATIVE BOUNDARIES AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL by CLAYTON CARLYLE TARR B.A., Indiana University, 2005 M.A., University of South Carolina, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2013 INDEX WORDS: Novel, Gothic, Realism, Framing devices, Narrative, Aesthetics, Print culture The comfortable realism we expect, that which directs us towards claims of objectivity, but it is a realism based on human experience, the often disturbing, sometimes horrifying reality of perspective, untruth, and doubt. Far from tangential, the Gothic novel in fact provides a foundation for aesthetic realism. “The Force of a Frame” excavates, for the first time, the rich relations between frame and form to develop a new understanding of the narrative dynamics and aesthetic vibrancy of the Gothic novel. In addition, it interrogates how several nineteenth-century writers reimagine the Gothic frame, first through chapters on the Brontës and Dickens, and finally through Joseph Conrad and Henry James. The study proceeds with chapters on Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Charles Robert Maturin, and James Hogg. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, Walton’s letters enclose Victor’s central narrative, but when the creature authoritatively appears in both sections of the frame, the comforting narrative boundary between character and reader ruptures. ![]() ![]() Starting with Ann Radcliffe’s revolutionary approach, which situated the frame narrative within the fiction itself rather than outside as paratext, novelists used form to intensify the Gothic effect. While frame narratives appear to provide structure-limits, boundaries, borders- they far more frequently disturb narrative cohesiveness. This project, however, reads them as formally destabilizing. Studies of the Gothic have either neglected framing devices or dismissed them as conventions that establish structures of narrative. THE FORCE OF A FRAME: NARRATIVE BOUNDARIES AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL by CLAYTON CARLYLE TARR (Under the Direction of Richard Menke) ABSTRACT This study examines frame narratives from the late eighteenth century through the late Victorian period. ![]()
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