Specters of the Past: Redefining the Gothic Genre through Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

This thesis examines how African American writers reuse common gothic tropes and conventions to illustrate their everyday lived reality and the haunting, psychological turmoil of slavery. I will be using Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to highlight how the gothic saturates much of African American literature, but also how such authors appropriate and subvert gothic tropes and conventions to reclaim Black identity and agency. By examining the gothic elements of Invisible Man, we can see how Ellison transformed those elements to help relay the Black experience.