The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Studies in English & American Literature & Culture)

Gothic literature and art often include dreamlike states, or resemble or represent dreams. Drawing on Carl Jung's ideas of dream interpretation, as well as Hartmann's biological research on nightmares and Victor Turner's anthropological work on the liminal, this work offers close readings of poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats, and novels such as "Frankenstein" and "Dracula", as well as analyses of paintings by Turner and Fuseli, to argue that the works' characters, plots and images represent failure of individuation: psychic disintegration in which the Self not only falls short of a centred consciousness, but also suffers the ego's absorption into the unconscious. Although recent studies of the genre have probed behind the traditional Gothic conventions to shed light on their psychological meanings, most have limited themselves to a single author or genre (usually fiction) and to the theories of Freud or Lacan. In contrast, this book emphasizes Jung's theory of individuation, and how the failure to achieve wholeness can lead to self-destruction.