STORRE

This thesis explores what I will call autonomist narratives of disability, namely representations of disability that intensify critiques of waged work and welfare capitalism, in twentieth- and twenty-first century Scottish writing. Disability has never been considered as a category of analysis through which to study Scottish writing. My investigation will argue that what forecloses a disability studies approach in Scottish literature, and makes invisible narratives of disability in Scottish w...

First paragraph: In the middle of the Scottish winter, on 3 December 1725, George Mackenzie was laid to rest amongst his ancestors in the ruins of Fortrose Cathedral, his corpse attended by "all the Gentlemen of the Country". It was a fitting end for a respected local physician, a member of one of the north of Scotland’s most powerful noble houses, and the anonymous eulogy delivered upon him in the pages of the Caledonian Mercury later that month was fulsome: "His indefatigable Industry in th...

This thesis is a critical study of British and American Gothic prose representations of madness and the madhouse. This focuses on historical changes in asylum practice from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, specifically from 1846 to 2014. While Gothic scholarship generally regards madness as being identifiable within most works of the genre, few studies have attempted to explain why it is that the Gothic’s fascination with madness has endured beyond its literary origins in...