Dissertations
Anderman, Elizabeth Quainton. "Visible Sensations: Ekphrasis and Illustration in Victorian
Sensation Novels." University of Colorado, Boulder, 2006.
Ashman, Anne. "A Psychobiographical Study of Death, Mourning, and the Swedenborgian
After-Life in the Later Works of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu." Aberdeen University, 2005.
A superbly researched and argued work that studies Freud's writings on death and the theological
works of Emaunuel Swedenborg to show how death and mourning stimulated Le Fanu's creativity
during a time that he withdrew from society after his wife's death.
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."
Cahalan, James Michael. "Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel." University of
Cincinnati, 1982.
With an emphasis on history rather than literary criticism, Cahalan stresses the fact that after his two
historical novels, Le Fanu abandoned history and retreated into Gothicism.
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.
DeWees, Amanda R. "Blood Lines: Domestic and Family Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Vampire
Literature." University of Georgia, 1998.
Fox, Renee Allyson. "Necromantic Victorians: Reanimation, History, and the Politics of Literary
Innovation, 1868-1903." Princeton University, 2010.
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.
Hall, Emily Bancroft. "Domesticating Emotions: Technologies of Affect in Victorian Literature and
Culture." University of Wisconsin, 2000.
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."
Haslam, Richard. "Representations and the Sublime in Six Irish Writers: A Study of Edmund
Burke, Lady Morgan, Charles Maturin, James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and
William Carleton." Trinity College, Dublin, 1992.
Heldman, James M., Jr. "Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel." University of North Carolina,
1968.
Klemens, Elke. "Dracula und 'Seine Tochter: die Vampirin als Symbol im Wandel der Zeit."
University of Mannheim, 2003
LaPerriere, Maureen-Claude. "Unholy Transubstantiation: Christifying the Vampire and
Demonizing the Blood." University of Montreal, 2008.
An interesting study of the vampire in literature from a religious and secular point of view. While
emphasis is on Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, Le Fanu's "Carmilla" is given a place here as
an example of the sexual element of vampirism.
Lee, Hyun-Jung. "Evil Genius: Victorian Popular Fiction as Moral Philosophy." Northwestern
University, 2009.
In this study of changing, more ambiguous ideas about evil in the Victorian era, Le Fanu's In a Glass
Darkly is considered. Lee draws from the "convergence of physical, psychical, and epistemological
ambiguity in interpreting horror." Eschews a psychological reading and chooses to regard what he
calls "felt evil." "Felt evil . . . denotes the vague, ominous sense of proximity to malignancy that Le
Fanu" delights in portraying.
Lozes, Jean. "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, romancier et nouvellistes anglo-irlandais." d'Etat,
Universite de Toulouse-Le-Mirail, 1987.
Marlan, Dawn Alohi. "The Ends of Seduction, or, Libertines, Respectable Folks, Vampires, and
Harassers." University of Chicago, 2000.
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.
An interesting anthropological study centering on Charles Darwin and Arthur Conan Doyle that
also discusses the sensation novels of Collins, Reade, Braddon, and touches on Le Fanu. A good
background study for Le Fanu's mystery novels.
Pedlar, Valerie. "The Representation of Madness in Victorian Fiction." University of Liverpool,
1993.
Studies Le Fanu's The Rose and the Key from the perspective of the central character, who is
victimized by her own mother when she is deceived and told she is being sent to a country house,
not knowing that it is an asylum. Le Fanu emphasizes imagery of the visual to show how Maud is
deceived. The novel is a profound study of human avarice and cruelty.
Penzoldt, Peter. "The English Short Story of the Supernatural." These--Geneve, 1952.
The dissertation on which Penzoldt bases his book The Supernatural in Fiction.
Peyre-Ropars, Lydie. "Translation with Commentary of Three Ghost Stories of the Late Nineteenth
Century and Early Twentieth Centuries by Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James, Mary Eleanor Wilkins."
Universite de Lille, 1995.
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.
Studies the figure of the female vampire in Theophile Gautier's "La Morte amoureuse," Henry
James's "The Last of the Valerii," and J. S. Le Fanu's "Carmilla" within the framework of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. The vampire's return from the grave is a figuration of the "return of the repressed,"
and in Lacanian terms, this "horror" can be seen as the resurgence of desire (repressed in
accordance with the Law of the Father) threatening not only the subject's insertion into the symbolic
order but the entire social structure founded upon that order. The female vampire tale is
ultimately reassuring because it confronts a threat to the symbolic order and defeats it, though only
by revealing the violence that is the source of the symbolic.
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, Catherine Mary. "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.
An excellent study of the development of Freud's theories of the mind from the literature and
culture of the Victorian era. Studies the tales of In a Glass Darkly to show how Le Fanu's ideas of the
structure of the mind presages Freud's crystallization of his theories of the subconscious.
Viville, Isabelle. "La Figuration du Monstre dans la Litterature et a L'Ecran de 'Vampyr' de Carl
Dreyer a 'Elephant-Man' de David Lynch." University of Strasbourg, 1986.
Williams, Julia McElhattan. "'The Nation Articulate': the Discourse of Colonialism and the
Anglo-Irish Novel." Emory University, 1992.
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.