“If There Were a Hell on Earth”: Katabasis and Representations of Hell in Contemporary American and America-centred Fiction

Latham, Hannah Elizabeth (2023) “If There Were a Hell on Earth”: Katabasis and Representations of Hell in Contemporary American and America-centred Fiction. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

Katabasis, from the Greek ‘to go down’, indicates a journey down into the underworld in order to retrieve a boon and to ascend back to the surface triumphantly. Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid are the most famous versions of the mytheme, which was later popularised in mediaeval times by Dante in his Inferno. The trope has consistently been used in literature since its beginnings, and as such a core framework has been developed from these key examples and others like them, identifiable for the presence of a descent, the aid of a guide, and the separation of the underworld or Hell from the primary upper world. This thesis discusses the presence of katabasis and the representations of hellspaces in six contemporary Anglo-American texts: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground, Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Drawing from previously established patterns of katabatic journeys both old and new, this thesis aims to analyse the way in which katabasis and its requisite underworlds or hellspaces have been transformed into modern, experimental textual allusions. It suggests that for these texts and others like them, katabasis, the journey involved, and the representation of Hell become forms of routine metaphors that the authors wield as reminders of their origins in order to establish new patterns from the old. This thesis analyses not only the descent into the underworld in terms of how it has taken on a more metaphorical or horizontal approach due to increasing industrialisation and experimentality, often changing the parameters of descent as laid out in the pattern, but the space of Hell takes on a greater importance. Due to increasing secularisation, the space of Hell also takes on new forms, and why it is still closely linked to past associations despite this is at the centre of the discussion on the novel’s chosen spaces of representation.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	13 Nov 2023 16:33
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2023 16:33
DOI:	10.17638/03176566
Supervisors:	Seed, David
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3176566