Franziska Stolz

Franziska Stolz is an associate doctoral student at the Graduate School "Family Matters". She studied English Philology and Language, Literature, and Culture at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, where she also worked as a student assistant and tutor. In 2015, she pursued English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Since 2021, she has been a research assistant at the Institute of English Philology at LMU Munich (Chair Prof. Tobias Döring).

Thesis topic: "Monster Families: Symptomatic Readings from Early Modern to Late Modern English Literature"

Throughout the history of English literature, the family is haunted by monstrous figures. Monsters represent the ambiguous Other and the unnatural, frequently juxtaposed with the seemingly self-evident and natural unit of the family in various texts. They seduce daughters, kill brothers, and steal children. They challenge the legitimacy of paternal authority, overstep the boundaries of heteronormative and monogamous relationships, and problematise notions of blood ties. They threaten, sabotage, subvert, and ruin families – but only seemingly from the outside. Monsters have families; families have monsters: Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest (c. 1611), Frankenstein’s creature (1818), Stoker's Dracula (1897), and the fifth child in Doris Lessing's eponymous novel (1988) all claim intimate familial connections with those who feel threatened by them. As part of familial systems, but as disruptive elements, monsters embody what needs to be severed, replaced, concealed, disguised, denied, or removed from the family.
My project regards stories about monsters as a central element of the narrative repertoire of the family, problematising ongoing efforts to define the boundaries and negotiate the limits of the family. Through my investigation, I aim to shed light on how such narratives contribute to the imaginary institution of the family by creating imaginary Others, which, given critical attention, reveal what needed to be suppressed by or detached from the family at different historical junctures to guard its conceptual and social stability.