Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880-1914

ISBN-13: 9781845196776 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 224 str.

Oliver Tearle

Opis

This wide-ranging book explores the many factors that contributed to the rise in the interest in hallucination and visionary experience in writing during the 19th century and beyond. The work discusses how, even before the vogue for psychical research and spiritualism began to influence writers at the end of the 19th century, tales of horror, the supernatural, ghosts, and demons had been haunted by the possibility of some grand deception by the senses. It then shows how hallucination took on a new force and significance not just in ghost stories and horror fiction but in other forms of writing, and how authors began to encourage their readers to assess whether the ghostly had its origins in some supernatural phenomenon from beyond the grave or from some deception within our own minds. Through a series of close and often unusual readings of numerous writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and Arthur Machen, this original study explores what happened when hallucination appeared in fiction, and--even more importantly--why it happened at all.