Ray Kietzman

My dissertation is about the birth of American horror fiction in the long 19th century out of American Gothic fiction. I argue that horror, a genre marked by a fascination with themes of fear and revulsion, serves as a laboratory to explore the crises of categorization which erupt from the failure of Enlightenment ideals in the formation of American identity. My dissertation is primarily concerned with themes of gender and race, and with how the cluster of texts I read as early American horror fiction engage in the monsterization of the racial and gendered other.