The dark thread : from tragical histories to gothic tales /
edited by John D. Lyons.
- x, 306 pages ; 24cm.
- ( The early modern exchange ) .
- Early modern exchange. .
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-246) and index.
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 arriv�e au ch�ateau 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 / John D. Lyons -- Herv�e-Thomas Campangne -- David Laguardia -- Timothy Chesters and John D. Lyons -- Kathleen Long -- Marina S. Brownlee -- Mar�ia Tausiet -- Michael Meere -- Caroline Warman -- Guy Spielmann -- Philippe Roger -- Alison Booth -- Jennifer Tsien -- Jocelyn Moore.
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
In English, with French and Spanish passages accompanied by English translations.