ENG 510 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Spiritism, Tragic Hero, Emanuel Swedenborg
Document Summary
Jack sullivan elegant nightmares: the english ghost story from le fanu to. Nancy h. traill possible worlds of the fantastic: the rise of the paranormal in ficiton (1996) Victorians were fascinated by the paranormal and it lead to serious scientific explorations of the subject. Early gothic ghosts are theatrical, spectral and often melodramatic. Victorian ghosts are more mobile and more ordinary; sometimes they are indistinguishable from ordinary things. Their motivations are mysterious: some victorian ghost stories follow the same premise of old, such as a. Sullivan: late victorians have a fascination with darkness and irrationality, The focus is on subjectivity: how something is seen is more important than. Victorian ghosts stories seem to have no reason or logic. In the same way in which we see frankenstein as a science fiction, not a fantasy: thus, traill separates the paranormal mode from it"s different familiar genres. Fantasy: a different world from our own, where nothing is questioned (lotr)
