The Dark Thread

Examines a set of perennial narrative motifs centred on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. This book questions the traditional separation between the honoured genre of tragedy and the less respected genres of histoires tragiques, gothic tales and novels, and horror stories.

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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.