Abstract
This paper explores the ways that Horace Walpole’s Gothic texts, The Castle of Otranto, The Mysterious Mother, and even the architectural Strawberry Hill, operate within a fascinating nexus of visual and narrative discourse. By analysing the intersections of the verbal and visual within these works, which combine and collide within liminal spaces that figure a threshold state between the supernatural and the subconscious, this paper explores the ways that Walpole’s texts work collectively to interrogate eighteenth-century theories of perception and imagination by positing a slippage between word and image that undermines the human attempt to make sense of the world.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 5-17 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Image & Narrative: online magazine of the visual narrative |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Keywords
- gothic
- Gothic fiction
- eighteenth-century literature
- architecture
- supernatural
- ghosts
- literature
- Literature and history
- space and place
- literary criticism
- perception
- vision
- imagination
- space