Ghost story

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Ghost stories ( English ghost story ; French histoire des revenants ) are eerie narratives in which ghosts or similar beings play a decisive role.

particularities

Ghost stories are mostly shorter narratives that can also appear as internal elements of a novel or cycle of novels .

The common structure of a ghost story follows the scheme: introduction of the narrative perspective - tension generation - certification - increase - final effect. The action usually takes place in front of a romantic local color , and characters typical of the genre include devils , witches , doppelgangers , nature spirits , knights and vampires in addition to ghosts .

A ghost story is classified as fantastic literature if the appearance of the uncanny being does not turn out to be a scientifically explainable phenomenon, as is the case, for example, with an illusion . These actual ghost stories are usually characterized by the productive sense of insecurity that characterizes this genre. In the reader the uncanny doubt arises whether the event can be explained scientifically in retrospect, whether a reference to the supernatural is omitted and certainty in the natural course of the world is restored.

development

The many texts of ghost phenomena that have existed since antiquity are not actually ghost stories in terms of their structure, i.e. not modern reception, since the authors and readers predominantly assumed that ghosts existed until the Enlightenment . With Homer, for example, the supernatural in today's sense is an integral part of storytelling.

Daniel Defoe's True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal can be regarded as the first modern ghost story . The English writer Defoe gives his story the appearance of an authentic portrayal and arouses in the reader the doubt that is characteristic of this genre. The pseudo-documentary method of telling something that supposedly goes back to a true event was used over and over again later.

While this story was initially an isolated case, played ghosts late 18th and early 19th century. The Gothic novel (. English, Gothic Novel ) a major role. Ann Radcliffe successfully developed the genre influenced by Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve . She succeeded in creating shivers of the mysterious and supernatural and at the same time establishing typical places like the mysterious castle in the mountains.

With the beginning of the Romantic period , numerous collections of ghost stories appeared, the elements of which were often based on folk tales . Comparable to the work of the Brothers Grimm , Friedrich Laun and Johann August Apel collected various motifs and materials in their ghost book and worked on them. The model of Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber comes from this collection .

The literary level of this genre is extremely different, because with the typical elements of the effective and sensational tension generation , it was inevitable that this genre also blossomed trivial. More ambitious narratives, in which the rationalism of the Enlightenment is questioned and the complexity of the world was underlined by the uncanny ambiguity, can be found in the work of ETA Hoffmann and Heinrich von Kleist .

In Locarno's beggar woman, for example, the ghost of a beggar haunts a castle. She had been taken in by the marquise, but had been referred to another corner of the room by the marquis and was fatally injured in the process. In the end the marquise escapes, the castle is on fire and the marquis commits suicide. The different elements of the narrative, the relationship between guilt and punishment stimulated many psychological and socially critical interpretations, which ultimately refer back to the mysteriousness as the defining feature of the text and make it appear as a typical German ghost story.

Authors whose ghost stories feature elements of horror include HP Lovecraft , Clark Ashton Smith, and Stephen King .

Types of ghost stories

Different types of ghost stories can be distinguished.

The aim of the moral ghost story is to convey a message to the reader. In these stories the mind has to atone for an offense, cannot calm down because of the agony of conscience, or gives another character new insights. A well-known example of this in the Victorian popular tense is the Christmas story by Charles Dickens .

The psychological variant developed from the moral, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu can be regarded as the most successful representative of this. Here the interpretation of the phenomenon remains open; it can be understood as an expression of a sick psyche as well as an intrusion of the supernatural. This form has proven to be the most productive to the present day.

In the humorous ghost story, the apparitions have a supernatural background, but do not prevent the reader from making fun of them, as in Oscar Wilde's The Ghost of Canterville .

Symbolic ghost stories enjoyed themselves at the end of the 19th century. some popularity. In them, ambivalent appearances play a role, which symbolically express a certain motive for action.

There were always overlaps between the variants; the last three are still used today in literature or horror films.

Other ghost story writers

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Ghost story  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Metzler, Lexikon Literatur , Gespenstergeschichte, p. 287, Weimar, 2007
  2. ^ A b Rein A. Zondergeld , Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur , Gespenstergeschichte, Suhrkamp, ​​Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 278.
  3. ^ Rein A. Zondergeld, Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur , Gespenstergeschichte, Suhrkamp, ​​Fantastic Library, Frankfurt 1983. Radcliffe, Ann. P. 200.
  4. ^ Wilpert Lexikon der Weltliteratur , Das Bettelweib von Locarno, p. 143
  5. ↑ Johannes von Guenther (ed., Trans.): Russian ghost stories. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1961, (12th edition 1975) ISBN 3-436-00434-0 .