Ashley Kniss Ph.D.

Research

My primary area of interest is American literature of the nineteenth century. My dissertation, “The Last Things and the Gothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Blended Frameworks in the Works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Dickinson,” explores how authors of the mid-nineteenth century appropriated Gothic conventions to articulate growing anxiety about theology regarding death, the Intermediate State, resurrection, the Second Coming, and Apocalypse. I argue that these representative authors contradict mainstream narratives in religious rhetoric of the period through their use of the Gothic mode. The larger implication of this study suggests a need to expand the definition of American Gothic to include the subject of Apocalypse as it applies to American history and national identity.