Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

8-11-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Program

English

First Advisor

Mike Hill

Committee Members

Rick Barney, Kir Kuiken

Keywords

English Novel, Realism, Gothic, Masses, Genre, Collective Forms of Subjectivity

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature | Literature in English, British Isles

Abstract

This dissertation studies the eighteenth-century English novel and expands the understanding of realism by rereading realist novels through Gothic representations of the masses. The conventional understanding of realism is shaped by Ian Watt’s canonical concept of “formal realism” in The Rise of the Novel and Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the bourgeois public sphere. It identifies realism with a vision of civility grounded in the modern individual and bourgeois social reality. However, the masses and the Gothic challenge this conception of the novel’s realism by representing the social as constituted by collective agency, political violence, and struggles over power rather than bourgeois civility. The Gothic offers an alternative mode of representing social reality by deploying terror, imagination, and violence to depict collective forms of life embodied by the masses. Thus, a comparative rereading of realist novels alongside Gothic texts identifies Gothic expressions of social reality and alternative, collective forms of subjectivity. The interrelation between realism and the Gothic, drawing on Ralph Cohen’s conception of genre as an inherently mixed form, expands the understanding of realism by incorporating the masses and the Gothic into the novel’s generic form.

To examine the alternative, collective forms of subjectivity associated with the masses, the dissertation focuses on three representative social figures—the crowd, women, and servants—in three comparative chapters that place realist novels in dialogue with Gothic texts. The first chapter pairs Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones with Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian to examine mob violence and the collective agency of the crowd, demonstrating how these forms complicate bourgeois individuality and social order. The second chapter reads Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders alongside Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian to investigate how female subjectivity exceeds the boundaries of bourgeois domesticity through domestic terror, plebeian sexual autonomy, and transgressive Gothic femininity. The third chapter brings Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews into dialogue with William Godwin’s Caleb Williams to examine how servants reveal the mechanisms of hegemonic oppression while demonstrating forms of lower-class autonomy that resist the ideal of the free bourgeois individual. Together, these comparative readings expand the conventional understanding of realism by demonstrating how Gothic modes illuminate collective and marginalized forms of subjectivity that enable a broader representation of social reality.

License

This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.

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