The Dark Thread

From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales

John D. Lyons

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781644531631, 9781644531624
• eBook ISBN: 9781644531648
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the dead, and subsequent apparitions of ghosts that haunt the household unite "high" and "low" cultural traditions. This book questions the traditional separation between the highly honored genre of tragedy and the less respected and generally less well-known genres of histoires tragiques, gothic tales and novels, and horror stories.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Index

Index does not include items from notes nor bibliography.

adultery, 36–37, 74, 84, 91, 94, 110–11, 133, 138, 200, 228, 230

Aeschylus, 1, 3, 16–17, 22, 24; Agamemnon, 225, 226–35; Choephoroi, 22; Eumenides, 231

Alboin and Rosamund story, 9, 129–31, 133, 135–47

America, Gothic in, 11, 12, 194, 211, 216, 218

Americas: travel to, 38; cannibals in, 118; race in, 212–22

ancestors, 23, 40, 94, 96–97, 200, 216, 229. See also family

Ancients and Moderns, Quarrel of, 15, 17, 27

apparition, 9, 23–24, 71, 76–77. See also ghost; specter

Ariosto, Ludovico, 89

Aristotle, 2–3, 5, 16, 18, 24–25, 37–38, 46, 54, 61, 92

Artaud, Antonin, 177, 181, 186; Le Moine, 177, 196

assimilation (cultural), 216–17, 221, 230

Austen, Jane, 204–5; Northanger Abbey, 204

Bandello, Matteo, 7, 10, 23, 25, 31, 36, 46, 48, 62, 104, 130

Barbey d’Aurevilly, J., 9, 82–89, 91, 93–101

Baro, Balthazar, Rosemonde, 130–31, 133–34, 136, 138–40

Barthes, Roland, 73, 178, 186

Bataille, Georges, 178

Belleforest, François de, 7–10, 25, 30–44, 46, 130, 133, 138, 146–47, 150, 158

Bellin de la Liborlière, 185–86; Célestine ou les époux sans l’être, 186

Bentham, Jeremy, 191

Billard, Clau...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Death of Tragedy and the Birth of the Gothic
• Metamorphoses of the Histoires tragiques
• The Real of the Tragic Tale in Sixteenth-Century France
• Doubtful Readings in Rosset, Nodier, and Potocki
• The Beauty of Violence in Rosset and Barbey d’Aurevilly
• Solution and Dissolution: Zayas’s Darkening Threads
• Evil Mothers: From Devouring Witches to Deadly Ghosts
• On Specters and Skulls: Rosamund and Alboin in Seventeenth-Century French Tragedy
• “Autre fait arrivé au château de Nicklspurg, en Moravie”: Diderot and the Horrid Case Study
• At the Dark Edge of Enlightenment: Early Modern Vampires
• Darkness at Noon: Sade’s Way to Terror
• Anachronism, Heterotopia, and Gender in Anglophone Gothic
• Inassimilable: Gothic Francophobia in “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street”
• Houses That Live and Die: From Greek Tragedy to the Gothic
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index