本文目的在於探討現代形式的「鬼故事」如何在維多利亞時期的英國出現並蓬勃發展，以及此一文類的興起與維多利亞時期文化之間的關係。「哥德式文類」（或又稱志異文類、驚悚文類）發展於十八世紀中末期的歐洲，到了十九世紀中期的英國，出現了一個關鍵性的轉變。在此轉變裡，大量的鬼故事被創作出來，且受到廣大讀者的喜愛。而不同於以往的志異文學文本，自此之後，超自然的恐怖敘事不再將背景設定於遙遠的古代，而是將故事帶進了當代的生活環境裡。不只如此，連敘事手法都從以往的浪漫傳奇形式轉變成寫實風格。針對此一大眾文學形式上的轉變，本論文提出一個如下的詮釋：處在一個變動轉換的時代，維多利亞人面對了許多進步與變動中所產生的衝突，卻無法在心理上快速地適應它們。因此，維多利亞人對這些尚未處理的衝突和問題感到極度焦慮。維多利亞的鬼魅敘事裡，經常圍繞在「真正的恐怖來自當代生活中的墮落」這樣的命題上。因此，許多學者表示，這些鬼魅敘事正好再現了維多利亞人們對當代社會情境與文化價值的焦慮與不滿。在接下來的第一章中，本論文將先做文獻探討，除了這個文類的發展，也會討論之前的相關研究與其疏失。第二章從佛洛伊德、紀捷克的心理分析理論和德希達對幽靈與倫理的討論出發，來探討在維多利亞時期鬼魅敘事裡，這些尚未解決卻又遭到壓抑的社會文化問題及其引發的負面情緒如何回返並以鬼魅的方式困擾著當代人。而第三、四、五章將以十一個不同的維多利亞鬼故事為範例，探討當代對於這些「尚未解決的文化壓抑」所產生的魅影及其焦慮。最後第六章將為這份論文做總結，並比較鬼魅敘事和維多利亞現實主義文類的不同及貢獻。

This thesis is going to examine how the modern type of ghost story flourished in the Victorian England and how it could be related to the Victorian culture. The Gothic genre had developed since the second half of the eighteenth century, but it made a crucial shift in the mid-nineteenth century England, where the type of ghost stories we are familiar with now were widely spread among all classes of readers. Since then, the supernatural horror was brought from a distant past into the contemporary domestic space and from an imaginary, romance-like setting to the present time presented in a realistic style. Struggling in an age of transition, the Victorians confronted lots of conflicts in fast social changes and technological progress while the people failed to adapt themselves to the changes well. The ill adaptation then engendered anxiety about unsolved problems in their contemporary world. Here, as many scholars proclaim, the ghost stories, in which the “real horror of everyday corruption” was represented, became an embodiment of the Victorian frustration and disaffection over their contemporary society and culture. In the first chapter, in addition to the development of the Victorian ghost story, I will also talk about the previous studies on this genre and their disadvantages. In the second chapter, I will discuss how, in the Victorian ghost stories, the repressed but unsolved conflicts caused by the rapid social changes return to haunt the Victorians, in terms of Sigmund Freud’s and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic theories and Jacques Derrida’s ethical conception about the specter. And the third, fourth and fifth chapters examine 11 ghost stories by different Victorian writers and their representations of the Victorian anxiety about the unsolved conflicts in their culture. In the end, the sixth chapter will conclude the whole thesis and compare the realist novel and the ghost story in Victorian England to present their differences and the latter’s further contribution.

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