At the limits of perception: liminal space, vision and the interrelation of word and image in Walpole's Strawberry Hill, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother

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    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 languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)5-17
    Number of pages13
    JournalImage & Narrative: online magazine of the visual narrative
    Volume18
    Issue number3
    Publication statusPublished - 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

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