Dark Thread
Subtitle: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2019
Language: eng; fre; spa
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9781644531631
Description: 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.