The Uncanny Narrated

Kateryna Kühn-Rudenko

The Uncanny Narrated. Functions of Narrative Strategies in Different Types of Uncanny Representation in Stephen King's Novels It and Firestarter

ISBN 978-3-86821-320-1, 206 S., kt., € 21,50 (2011)

(SALS - Studies in Anglophone Literatures, Bd. 37)

The uncanny as a significant psychoanalytic concept, which has been haunting literary and cultural studies since Jentsch and Freud, is reconceptualized in this study in a way that permits its fruitful application to the analysis of horror texts as well as a first-ever detailed study of the mutually interacting semantic and formal dimensions of the narrated uncanny. Above all, this research manifests that the intended uncanny effect of the works of horror under analysis is accounted for not only by their content but also by their narrative form. This study is dedicated to the strategies of narrating horror and focuses on how horror in all its forms, shades and hues is narrated and by what narratives means: It describes the functions of narrative forms (as specific forms of representing the content) in different types of uncanny representations, and, to be more precise, the attitudes of semantic importance that they encode and the aesthetic goals they serve to achieve. The uniqueness of this work consists in that it suggests answers to a number of challenging theoretical questions, an innovative typology of the uncanny narrated as well as a terminologically and conceptually transparent methodology for the narratological analysis of the narrated uncanny.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)