In English, with French and Spanish passages accompanied by English translations.
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Contents
The death of tragedy and the birth of the gothic / John D. Lyons -- Metamorphoses of the Histoires tragiques / Herve-Thomas Campangne -- The real of the tragic tale in sixteenth-century France / David Laguardia -- Doubtful readings in Rosset, Nodier, and Potocki / Timothy Chesters and John D. Lyons -- The beauty of violence in Rosset and Barbey d'Aurevilly / Kathleen Long -- Solution and dissolution: Zayas's darkening threads / Marina S. Brownlee -- Evil mothers: from devouring witches to deadly ghosts / María Tausiet -- On specters and skulls: Rosamund and Alboin in seventeenth-century French tragedy / Michael Meere -- "Autre fait arrive au château de Nicklspurg, en Moravie": Diderot and the horrid case study / Caroline Warman -- At the dark edge of enlightenment: early modern vampires / Guy Spielmann -- Darkness at noon: Sade's way to terror / Philippe Roger -- Anachronism, heterotopia, and gender in anglophone gothic / Alison Booth -- Inassimilable: gothic Francophobia in "The haunted house' in Royal Street" / Jennifer Tsien -- Houses that live and die from Greek tragedy to the gothic / Jocelyn Moore.
Summary
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.
