Dissertations

Boone, Troy Monroe.  "Unearthing Plots:  Vampirism and Victorian Culture."  University of Rochester, 1994.

Le Fanu's "Carmilla" "engages imperialist discourse and depicts lesbian desire as a powerful resistance to Anglocentricism--a political resistance that for Le Fanu is attractive as well as threatening and that the formal structure of vampire fiction allows him to productively suspend."

Braun, Heather L. "Fatal Forms:  Disruption, Decay, and the Nineteenth-Century Femmme Fatale."  Boston College, 2007.

Cadwallader, Jen.  "Spirits of the Age:  Ghost Stories and the Victorian Psyche."  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009.

A good study of Victorian sciences and their views about the spiritual, especially ghosts.  Takes this information to a study of Le Fanu's major story sequences, The Purcell Papers and In a Glass Darkly and discusses Le Fanu's views of the supernatural.  "Substance abuse, a motif common to both story series, takes on differednt meanings when read through the lens of religious versus scientific thought, ultimately leaves his characters--and his readers--adrift in a universe with no clear answers and no single system to explain the workings of the world . . . . Le Fanu does not attempt to reconcile science and religion.  Characters following the lights of either system reach a point beyond which those lights cannot shine, an unknowable darkness where all meaning resides."

Carse, Wendy K. "Domesticity and the Victorian Gothic Short Story: 'Flesh and Blood is Not Made for Such Encounters.'"  Tulane University, 1991.

Approached from the point of view of a woman's role in a Victorian family, notes the repressed desires of the narrator of Le Fanu's "Carmilla."  The story is about "class tensions and forbidden desires . . . where relations among women threaten to surface with all the disruptive potential of the repressed set free, all the demonic power of the monstrous woman herself."

Corran, Sally Elaine.  "The Ghosts That Haunt Us:  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Stories of the Supernatural."  University of Tennessee, 2000.

Focuses on Le Fanu's supernatural stories in which he emphasizes the presence of forces beyond human knowledge and control.  Using Todorov's notion of the fantastic and Freud's notion of the uncanny, argues that Le Fanu presents spiritual, historical, and psychological forces as supernatural in order to warn his readers that there are powers in the material world working in ways that cannot be explained by science or rationalism.  Le Fanu challenges  the increasing rationalism and materialism of the nineteenth century by creating stories that leave readers questioning the veracity of events depicted, the reliability of the narrators, and the causes of the seemingly supernatural events.

Davis, Paul E.H. "From Castle Rackrent to Castle Dracula:  Anglo-Irish Agrarian Fiction in the Nineteenth Century."  University of Buckingham, 2008.

DeWees, Amanda R. "Blood Lines:  Domestic and Family Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Vampire Literature." University of Georgia, 1998.

Gallagher, Sharon May.  "Three Nineteenth-Century Irish Novelists, Their Gothic Myth, and National Literature:  Charles Robert Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker."  Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2004.

"Maturin, Le Fanu, and Stoker all turned to writing with the practical expectations of financial success and literary fame, but their work also indicates a search for identity.  The literary results were the Irish Gothic genre and the telling character of the Irish vampire that emerged from it."

Girard. Gaid. "Aspects et construction du fantastique dans le nouvelles de Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu."  Universite de Paris, 1993.

Goss, Sarah Judith.  "The Agony of Consciousness:  History and Memory in Nineteenth-Century Irish Gothic Novels." University of Oregon, 2003.

Relates Le Fanu's fiction to that of Maturin in that both were Huguenots and connected with the Church of Ireland. Regards Le Fanu's work as repeatedly "trying to imagine remedies to historical trauma"--the anxiety and guilt of the insular Anglo-Irish and, in Le Fanu, the self-haunting of his characters.

Hackenburg, Sara.  "Reading the Seen:  Mystery and Visual Fetishism in Nineteenth-Century Popular Narrative."  Stanford University, 2004.

Harris, Jason Marc.  "Folklore, Fantasy, and Fiction:  The Function of Supernatural Folklore in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Prose Narratives of the Literary Fantastic." University of Washington, 2001.

Revised and published as a book.  See "General Studies."

Heldman, James M., Jr.  "Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel."  University of North Carolina, 1968.

Lozes, Jean.  "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, romancier et nouvellistes anglo-irlandais." d'Etat, Universite de Toulouse-Le-Mirail, 1987.

Matthews, James Edward.  "Between Two Worlds:  Ghosts and Apparitions in British Fiction, 1835-1885." Duquesne University, 2001.

Studies the major and minor ghost stories and discusses Le Fanu's tales as presaging such writers as Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy.  Le Fanu stands alone in the ghost stories of his day because the ghosts arise from the individual personality and its anxieties in the Victorian imperial society in which they exist.  Notes that Le Fanu is a transitional figure in the development of the ghost story form.

Negrini, Alessandra.  "Le Fanu: Ghost Stories."  Universita degli Studi di Pavia, Italy, 2001.

Studies the prominent themes of Le Fanu's ghost stories: the vampire, the psychic-doctor-detective, Irish folklore, and the devil and the pact with the devil.  Also discusses the influence of Swedenborg and the rational explanations of the stories as opposed to the supernatural.

O'Malley, Patrick R.  "Skeletons in the Cloister:  Catholicism, Sexual Devience, and the Haunting of English National Identity."  Harvard University, 1999.

Revised and published as a book.  See "General Studies."

Panjabi, Gita Cecilia.  "Investigative Fictions:  Criminal Anthropology and the Nineteenth-Century Mystery Novel, 1860-1913."  New York University, 2002.

Pedlar, V. "The Representation of Madness in Victorian Fiction."  University of Liverpool, 1993.

Penzoldt, Peter. "The English Short Story of the Supernatural."  These--Geneve, 1952.

The dissertation on which Penzoldt bases his book The Supernatural in Fiction.

Reuber, Alexandra Maria.  "Haunted by the Uncanny:  Development of a Genre from the Late Eighteenth to the Late Nineteenth Century."  Louisiana State University, 2004.

Rogers, Susan Leigh.  "Vampire Vixens:  The Female Undead and the Lacanian Symbolic Order in Tales by Gautier, James, and Le Fanu."  University of California, Irvine, 1993.

Segura, Allison C.  "Perfect Creatures:  A Social and Cultural Representation of Vampires in Fiction and Film."  University of Louisiana, Lafayette, 2007.

Smajic, Srdjan.  "Genres of Truth: Vision and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Ghost and Detective Fiction."  Tulane University, 2003.

An interesting and complex study of the writings about ghosts in the nineteenth century and shows their impact on authors of ghost stories and detective fiction.  Brings into play philosophy and science to study how vision is dualistic, both scientific and spectral. Brings into play Le Fanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" and the tales of In a Glass Darkly to show how Le Fanu drew from metaphysical and scientific writing and weaved them into his ghost stories.

Stoddart, H. "Constructions of Gender and Hysteria in the Modern Gothic."  University of Reading, 1991.

Thomas, Ardel M.  "Victorian Monstrosities:  Sexuality, Race and the Construction of the Imperial Self, 1811-1924."  Stanford University, 1998.

Tingle, C.M.  "Symptomatic Writings:  Prefigurations of Freudian Theories and Models of the Mind in the Fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot."  University of Leeds, 2000.

Worth, Aaron.  "Tongues of Wire:  Telegraphy and Figures of Linguistic Transformation in Nineteenth- Century Fiction."  Brandeis University, 2004.

Explores the trope of telegraphically inflected or transformed language in works of nineteenth-century British and American literature.  Explores the treatment of language in Sheridan Le Fanu's novel of sensation Wylder's Hand in order to suggest its indebtedness to figures of linguistic breakdown traceable to the failure of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

Zwickel, Marion Carol.  "A Narratological Reading Emphasizing the Narrator/Narratee Relationships in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla."  West Virginia University, 1995.

A competent study of the complex narrator/narratee relationships of Le Fanu's "Carmilla" that concludes that the story is basically about the telling of tales about a taboo subject to the Victorians, lesbianism.  Zwickel, however, makes minor distortions: she regards Dr. Hesselius as the narrator Laura's "psychiatrist" and fails to see that Laura writes her narrative to a distant female friend she calls "a town lady." Otherwise, a useful study.