“The architecture of bad dreams”: the sentient house in Australian and Canadian literature, and five floors of basement: a novel

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Copyright: Mayr, Suzette
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Abstract
The “sentient house” is a sub-category of the “haunted house” literary genre that has received little creative or critical attention in Australia and Canada. Using four examples of Australian and Canadian “sentient house” literature – Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye, Daniel David Moses’ Big Buck City, and Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians – the research dissertation examines the ways in which Australian and Canadian writers have “renovated” the Euro-American sentient house genre within their respective national contexts. For example, writers such as Pyper and Cleven import the Euro-American trope of the “haunted castle” into their work, but challenge the normative assumptions associated with race and/or gender inherent in most Euro-American Gothic horror narratives. Alternatively, Lindsay’s and Moses’ texts reveal the subversive qualities that a sentient house can have in its material aspects such as its building materials and faulty construction. Lindsay, Cleven, and Moses also demonstrate that the sentient house trope can operate as a tool to interrogate residual colonial influence in countries such as Australia and Canada that are “haunted” by Indigenous dispossession of land. The houses are all – as space theorist Christine Wilson proposes – “unruly” spaces that also operate as uncanny, revelatory spaces that expose the oppressed and the hidden. The creative writing component, Five Floors of Basement, is a sentient house novel that centres on a university professor named Edith who works at the fictional University of Inivea, in Alberta, Canada. Her office is in Crawley Hall, a building that produces “sick-building syndrome” in its residents. Five Floors pushes the notion of a “sick” building beyond metaphor and into the literal: Crawley Hall is alive and “sick” – in every sense of the word. The novel follows Edith’s mental and physical disintegration as she tries to determine if she is being overwhelmed by too much university bureaucracy and asbestos renovation, or if she is being affected by Crawley Hall’s inherent evil. Ever concerned about her place within her “university family” in her home away from home, Edith struggles to balance the precarious relationship between her increasingly unhappy work life and her life outside of work.
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Author(s)
Mayr, Suzette
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Brewster, Anne
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Publication Year
2016
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Thesis
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PhD Doctorate
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