Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Metamorphoses and Innovations in Gothic Fiction

Abstract

Notwithstanding the fact that the Anglo-Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was one of the most popular writers of the British Victorian era, his name and most of his works are not well-known to a common reader. The present research investigates how the author inventively modifies traditional Gothic elements and penetrates them into human's consciousness. Such Le Fanu's metamorphoses and innovations make the artistic world of his prose more realistic and psychological. As a result, the article presents a comparative literary study of Le Fanu's text manipulations which seem to lead to the creation of Le Fanu's own kind of "psychological" Gothic.