Abstract
This thesis examines the issue of representability in writing produced about the London Blitz of 1940-1941 when aerial attack brought war to the home front for the first time in a conflict of this scale. For writers seeking to document this extraordinary historic event, a literature with a new standard of plausibility was required. The central concern of the thesis is the application of the mode I term gothic realism. I demonstrate how the antiquated gothic genre became an appropriate register for engaging with a very modern crisis and how its outlandish and supernatural tendencies became a new version of documentary realism. I argue that gothic realism emerged from the specific material and immaterial conditions of the Blitz to capture both the intensity of experience and the actuality of life on the home front. In using gothic realism, I argue that these writers tested the limits of realism while never completely surpassing its boundaries.The introduction establishes the parameters of gothic realism, identifying its defining features and its position in relation to the two modes from which it takes its name. It also considers the historical and literary context within which it emerged. The first chapter explores the impact of the Blitz upon domesticity and its representation in the wartime fiction of Elizabeth Bowen and George Stonier. It examines how gothic realism depicts the uncanniness of a once familiar environment and the changing rules of civilian life on the home front. Chapter two investigates how modern technology shifted modes of representation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how the Blitz interrupted these technologies. It explores how gothic realism is used in the writing of Henry Green (Yorke) and William Sansom as they reconciled the archaic genre with the modern world during a historical moment that defied straightforward representation. Chapter three considers madness and trauma in the work of Graham Greene and Anna Kavan and questions how the troubled mind perceives a disturbed world. It considers how these writers used gothic realism to depict madness as a personal and a political experience. War-damaged London literalised numerous gothic tropes; this thesis aims to show how these wartime texts use the gothic not only to document the home front experience but also to make sense of and to interpret a dramatically altering world whose strangeness appeared fictional.
| Date of Award | 1 May 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Lara Feigel (Supervisor) & Jon Day (Supervisor) |