Melancholy and the fantastic short story

• Autores: Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 756-764
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The fantastic mode of the Romantic period is influenced by melancholy as a state of mind conducive to fantasy. The scientific discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a new understanding of melancholy that was adapted by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant for their own philosophical aims.

    Writers of the nineteenth century such as Edgar A. Poe and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer were familiar with these new ideas and appropriated them for their own fantastic fictions. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Los ojos verdes” the main characters suffer melancholy and are subject to fantastic visions, largely influenced by the Nature that surrounds them.