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"Very much a woman of reason and propriety": Ann Radcliffe's female gothic romances and their eighteenth-century contexts
Klosová, Kateřina ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
In 1977 Ellen Moers in her Literary Women coined "Female Gothic" as a new term in literary criticism. In this she seemed to be laying the foundation for a new conception and specific way of thinking about women writers as related to the Gothic genre. Moers in her critical book on women's writing claims that the Female Gothic is "easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic"1. Nevertheless, along with other terms, Female Gothic was quickly adopted by the feminist critics and especially during the eighties of the twentieth century its interpretation underwent distinct changes. As Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik observe, since the late seventies "it has been increasingly acknowledged that women writers have made use of the non-realist Gothic mode in order to explore the problematic nature of female subjectivity in Western patriarchal culture"2. Thus, what was originally conceived of as a specific coinage for the Gothic novels distinct by their female authorship, became a term encompassing the specificities of both woman style of writing and of the woman character as a means for the exploration of female experience. The application of the term became more focused and consequently rather limited in the late 1980s. This was...
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A wood path to the vital self: the power of nature in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover
Klosová, Kateřina ; Armand, Louis (referee) ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor)
A wood in spring of such tender and perceptive description would certainly stir a living string not only in Connie Chatterley, the heroine of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. The vividness and intensity of life that glares out of this 'picture' represents a dominant feature of Lawrence's novel which belongs to the last, fifth period of the author's career. It is not a mere coincidence that what later became published as Lady Chatterley's Lover was, in fact, a novel Lawrence originally proposed to call Tenderness. It is indeed sensibility of extraordinary degree, intense perception of colours, of slight movements and changes that occur in nature and the parallel changes taking place in the characters that play a vital role in this novel. This "extension of consciousness, [ ... ] an ability to experience what it is like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or what he (A. Huxley) called Lawrence's 'superior otherness",2 chiefly account for the poetic, soothing, almost pastoral character of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It seems to be in this novel that Lawrence's long-lasting belief in the revitalizing and revivifying power of nature, the idea of man's contact with and return to nature and the acceptance of his origins therein as the only means of survival for mankind come to their climax and...
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