Republic of uzbekistan samarqand state institute of foreign languanges faculty of foreign languages

THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY EDUCATION OF THE
REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
SAMARQAND STATE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUANGES
FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
THE DEPARTMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

COURSE PAPER

On the theme: Gothic elements in the modern English novel.
:
THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

RESEACHER: Payziyeva Arofat
SCIENTIFIC ADVISER: ZAFAR DAMINOVICH ERDANOV
Group 2103
The work is defended on “____”______
And is assessed at “________”scores

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………3

MAIN PART:
CHAPTER I. What is Gothic Novel.

1. 
   Elements of Gothic Literature in English…………………..4
   

1.2. What are Gothic elements in modern literature………...10

CHAPTER II. Gothic novel origins


2.1. Features of Gothic fiction…………………………………22


2.2. Best gothic novels………..…………………………….……34


CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………38
THE LIST OF THE USED LITERATURE……………………………….…40

INTRODUCTION In this thesis, I will study Jennifer Egan's novel The Keep (2006) as a Gothic postmodern novel, focusing on imprisonment, escape, and the fears and anxieties of the modern world. My study will be executed through close textual analysis of Egan's novel. Through this textual analysis, I will examine the Gothic postmodern literary spaces of the novel, and later combine the ideas of imprisonment and escape to this analysis. In this thesis, I wish to prove that, with the combination of Gothic and postmodern conventions in The Keep, Egan makes a statement of the fears we encounter in our postmodern world. In the novel, these fears are often represented alongside the theme of imprisonment,which is one issue that will be later studied in this thesis. The idea of imprisonment manifests itself in the novel both in the physical and existential sense. These two different states of imprisonment are important to recognize, and will function as recurring themes in this thesis. The genre of Gothic postmodernism has not yet been widely studied, and neither have been Jennifer Egan's works. Her Pulitzer-prize winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011) has received some academic attention, but her earlier works, such as The Keep, have not yet been studied in the academic sense. Due to this lack of academic attention, I find the subject of my thesis to be relevant as well as worthy of studying. Also, even though the classic Gothic tales of Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole and other 18th-century Gothic authors have received a lot of academic attention, the more contemporary fiction with Gothic influence is often regarded as “carrying less

academic weight” (Spooner, 1). Modern Gothic fiction is thus often dismissed as being less relevant in the academic sense, and seen to belong more to popular culture and popular entertainment. Gothic fiction does still receive academic attention, but according to Maria Beville, this analysis is mostly confined to studies of horror film and fiction (8). Therefore, I would argue that studying a work of Gothic postmodernism will also contribute to this field of contemporary Gothic studies.
At this point, it is relevant to introduce one study that will function as one of the main sources for this thesis. Maria Beville is one of the few academics who has noted the existence, and thus studied further, the specific genre of Gothic postmodernism. In her study Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity (2009), she analyzes three postmodern novels, Paul Auster's City of Glass (1985), Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) and Martin Amis' Time's Arrow
(1991), and treats these novels as examples of Gothic postmodernism.
In this thesis, I will execute a similar analysis on Egan's more contemporary postmodern
novel. In Beville's study, Amis' Time's Arrow is treated as a Gothic postmodern novel about the
concept of immortality, while in Vonnegut's novel, unspeakable anxieties and terrors are presented
to the reader through a satirical effort and defamiliarisation (107). According to Beville, Auster's