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Cargando... Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (edición 2006)por Vernon Lee (Autor)
Información de la obraHauntings and Other Fantastic Tales por Vernon Lee
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I can't believe I didn't know about Vernon Lee till recently since she is the coolest. A Phantom Lover by Vernon Lee Published in 1890 in Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales This novella has been compared to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in that there is a question about whether the ghost of the story was merely a figment of the imagination of two of the characters. A Phantom Lover is set in an English country house called Okehurst sometime before 1886, during six weeks of late summer into early fall. The narrator is a painter who has been invited to Okehurst to paint the portraits of William and Alice Oke. William and Alice are distant cousins, both descended from Nicholas and Alice Oke who lived at Okehurst in the early 17th century. William is a very good looking young man, obviously very much in love with his wife, Alice. Alice is tall and very slender. She has a striking resemblance to the 17th century Alice, whose portrait hangs in Okehurst, and she cultivates this resemblance by dressing in clothes similar to the ones worn by the first Alice in her portrait. Alice alternates between being languorous and very distant on most occasions, and energetic, almost manic on other occasions, leaving the impression she is taking drugs of some kind. The 17th century Alice had had an admirer, the poet Christopher Lovelock. The 19th century Alice is obsessed with the love between her ancestress and Lovelock, telling the narrator at one point: "Such love as that," she said, looking into the far distance of the oak-dotted park-land, "is very rare, but it can exist. It becomes a person's whole existence, his whole soul; and it can survive the death, not merely of the beloved, but of the lover. It is unextinguishable, and goes on in the spiritual world until it meets a reincarnation of the beloved; and when this happens, it jets out and draws to it all that may remain of that lover's soul, and takes shape and surrounds the beloved one once more." Alice believes herself to be the reincarnation of the 17th century Alice and thus believes herself to be the object of Christopher Lovelock's love which has survived through the centuries. Lovelock is the ghost of the story. William Oke, Alice's husband, is consumed by jealousy and descends into madness, believing he sees Lovelock's ghost with Alice. Does Lovelock's ghost exist? Alice and William obviously believe it does. The narrator, however, does not. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Vernon Lee writes in the Preface to Hauntings, "My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts... of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own." First published in 1890, Lee's most famous volume of supernatural tales occupies a special place in the literature of the fantastic for its treatment of the femme fatale and the allure of the past, along with the themes of thwarted artistic creativity and psychological obsession. This collection, which includes the four stories originally published in Hauntings and three others, enables readers to consider Lee's work anew for its subtle redefinitions of gender and sexuality during the Victorian fin-de-siècle. The appendices, which include extensive excerpts from writings by Lee's predecessors and peers, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Lee's brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton, allow the reader to see how Lee takes on the themes and preoccupations of the late-Victorian period but adapts them to her own purposes. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.8Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Victorian period 1837-1900Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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