Laurence Scott
Thesis title: A Tale of Two Terrors: the aesthetics of terror in the novels of London and Paris, 1840-1945
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Educational Background
Laurence completed a Bachelor of Arts & Science degree at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. He holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Comparative Literature from King’s College London. He began his PhD at King’s in 2006.
Research
How is terror represented as an aesthetic experience over a century of the Parisian and the London novel? This thesis is concerned with understanding how existential terror may be differentiated from other modes of fear through a comparison of how these two literary traditions have deployed terror within their respective, fictionalized capitals. Close textual readings chart evolutions and cultural particularities of what it means to be terrified. Urban Gothic, panic, madness, and the terrors of war form the main vectors of comparison between French and English texts, which include the nineteenth century city mysteries of Sue and Reynolds, Proust’s La Recherche and Forster’s Howards End, Breton’s Nadja and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and Sartre’s Les Chemins de la Liberté.
First supervisor: Dr Mark Turner
Second supervisor: Professor Patrick ffrench