Oisin McManus

Thesis Title: The Gothicisation of the Arctic in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Supervisor: Professor Michèle Mendelssohn

Research interests: Romantic and Victorian literature, the Gothic, late-Victorian genre fiction, polar literature, travel and expedition writing, nature writing, the environmental humanities

Doctoral research: My thesis traces the emergence of the Arctic Gothic as a distinctive corpus in nineteenth-century British literature, examining its influences and articulating how (and to what end) nineteenth-century authors instil the Arctic with a sense of horror. Combining approaches from ecocriticism, Indigenous studies and print culture studies, I suggest that the Gothic afforded one of the primary modes of engagement with the Arctic during a period in which British whaling and exploration in the Arctic reached its peak and public interest in the region was widespread. Areas of focus include the interpenetration of Gothic fiction and non-fiction in expedition narratives and the periodical press, literary appropriations of Inuit mythology and folklore, Gothic and anti-Gothic responses to the 1845 Franklin Expedition, and neo-Victorian re-imaginings of Arctic horror.