The Macabre on the Margins: A Study of the Fantastic Terrors of the Fin de Siècle

Maria Beville

doi:10.2478/v10231-012-0058-3

Authors

Maria Beville Aarhus University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10231-012-0058-3

Abstract

With a view to discussing an important three-faceted example of marginality in literature whereby terror, the literary Fantastic and the fin de siècle period are understood as interconnected marginalia, this paper examines works such as Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” and H. Rider Haggard’s She from an alternative critical perspective to that dominating current literary discourse.

It demonstrates that in spite of the dominant associations of fantastic literature with horror, terror, as the marginal and marginalized fear of the unknown, with its uncanny, sublime and suspenseful qualities, holds a definitive presence in fin de siècle fantastic texts. Literary analysis of the chosen texts registers significant examples of the importance of terror to fantastic writing, and as such functions to extract an “aesthetics of sublime terror” from the margins of critical studies of this often macabre literary mode.

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Author Biography

Maria Beville, Aarhus University

Maria Beville is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Media at Aarhus University, Denmark, and currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Limerick. She is the author of Gothic-Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity, and editor of the journal Otherness: Essays and Studies. She has also published articles on the Gothic, the fantastic, postmodernism and on studies of Irish literature. She is co-director of the Centre for Studies in Otherness.

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