The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales

The Early Modern Exchange

by John D. Lyons (Contributor), Hervé-Thomas Campangne (Contributor), David LaGuardia (Contributor)

In  The Dark Thread , scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the dead, and subsequent apparitions of ghosts that haunt the household unite “high” and “low” cultural traditions. This book questions the traditional separation between the highly honored genre of tragedy and the less respected and generally less well-known genres of histoires tragiques, gothic tales and novels, and horror stories.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published October 30, 2019

About the author

John D. Lyons is a Master of Arts (MA), Yale University and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Yale University. He is a professor of the Department of French, University of Virginia