From Ghostly Hooves to Phantom Voices: Sound as a Source of Anxiety in Selected British Ghost Stories

• Thesis title in Czech: Dusot přízračných kopyt a hlasy zjevení: Zvuk coby zdroj úzkosti ve vybraných britských duchařských povídkách
• Thesis title in English: From Ghostly Hooves to Phantom Voices: Sound as a Source of Anxiety in Selected British Ghost Stories
• Key words: Vernon Lee|Margaret Oliphant|William Hope Hodgson|Edith Nesbit|duchařské povídky|zvuk|napětí|vypravěčské techniky
• English key words: Vernon Lee|Margaret Oliphant|William Hope Hodgson|Edith Nesbit|ghost stories|sound|anxiety|narrative strategies
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2021/2022
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Petra Johana Poncarová, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 07.03.2022
• Date of assignment: 07.03.2022
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 14.03.2022
• Date and time of defence: 31.01.2023 10:00
• Date of electronic submission: 09.01.2023
• Date of proceeded defence: 31.01.2023
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D.

Guidelines

This BA thesis is going to explore the use of sound as a means of creating tension and anxiety in four British ghost stories: William Hope Hodgson’s “The Horse of the Invisible” (1910), Vernon Lee’s “A Wicked Voice” (1890), Margaret Oliphant’s “The Open Door” (1882), and Edith Nesbit’s “The Mass for the Dead” (1912). Each of the stories employs a different kind of sound. In “The Horse of the Invisible”, it is an animal sound, in “The Open Door” it is a child’s voice repeating a phrase, in “A Wicked Voice”, one encounters the voice of a spectral castrato, and “The Mass for the Dead” features church music. The thesis will discuss the relationships between those who haunt and those who are haunted in connection to the sound, and also various properties of the sounds, such as who hears them, whether they are connected to a specific place or a situation, and how do characters respond to them and explain them. To broaden the scope of the argument, it will also refer to other famous ghost and horror stories where sound plays a prominent role, for example to works by Charles Dickes or Edgar Allan Poe.

References

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Caballero, Carlo. “‘A Wicked Voice’: On Vernon Lee, Wagner, and the Effects of Music.” Victorian Studies 35, no. 4 (Summer, 1992).
Fick, Thomas H. “Authentic Ghosts and Real Bodies: Negotiating Power in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Ghost Stories.” South Atlantic Review 64, no. 2 (1999): 81–97.
Harlow, Ilana. “Unravelling Stories: Exploring the Juncture of Ghost Story and Local Tragedy.” Journal of Folklore Research 30, no. 2/3 (1993): 177–200.
Margree, Victoria. “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit's Gothic Short Fiction.” Women’s Writing, vol. 21 (2014), 425-443
Marvell, Leon. “Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21, no. 3 (2010): 459-463, 500.
Pulham, Patricia. “The Castrato and the Cry in Vernon Lee's Wicked Voices.” Victorian Literature and Culture (2002) 421-37.
Scarborough, Dorothy. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. London: G. P. Putnam, 1917.
Smajic, Srdjan. “The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story.” ELH 70, no. 4 (2003): 1107–35.
Vrettos, Athena. “‘In the Clothes of Dead People’: Vernon Lee and Ancestral Memory.” Victorian Studies 55, no. 2 (2013): 202–11.
Whelan, Lara Baker. “Between Worlds: Class Identity and Suburban Ghost Stories, 1850 to 1880.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 35, no. 1 (2002): 133–48.