Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in...

(Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a...

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced....

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural...

Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls ‘the fantastic,’ between ‘the marvelous’ and ‘the uncanny.’ According to Todorov, ‘The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who...

(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans’ ‘love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.’ Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray ‘twilight of the reason,’ on ‘the borderland between...