Search

This research paper explores how and why the existing tradition of supernatural stories about ghosts and other fantastical creatures, which located terror as an external factor in these unnatural and malignant beings, was transformed in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century into tales that are instead focused on fear in terms of the internal psychology of the narrator and the protagonist. It investigates two well-known examples of psychological horror, E.TA. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" (1816) and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843). The research paper deploys a contextual historical approach examining the impact of Romanticism as a philosophy focusing on the individual's mental state and extreme psychological situations, as well as developing scientific ideas about psychology in the period. In my argument it is "madness" (which could affect anyone in society) that became the new fear that haunted and fascinated society, replacing the explicitly external supernatural. I also use Tzvetan Todorov's structuralist theory and model of "the fantastic" and suggest it is possible for a psychological tale to be fantastic in a different way than he envisages, insofar as madness is itself an experience where the victim is never sure if what they experience is real or unreal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the book "Gangsterland: A Tour Through the Dark Heart of Jazz-Age New York City," by David Pietrusza, is presented.

How do we adequately capture multivocal history? What are good ways to represent multiple narratives and arguments in an open‐ended fashion? The online publication Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep‐Mapping Modern East Asian History, edited by David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald, addresses these questions for modern East Asian spatial history. Mainly a tool for teaching and research, the website works by interlinking historiographical information and primary sources. Complementarily, Bodies and Structures 2.0 displays all its contents via a set of visualizations. In this review essay, I argue that this multimodal format is innovative on two ends. First, the site convincingly implements what earlier research on hypertext and visualization has long sought—namely, to exceed traditional text and its limitations to represent intricate matters neatly. This is because of these media formats' semiotic efficiency in analytically representing complex wholes and their parts. Second, Bodies and Structures 2.0 successfully translates its multivocal concept of spatial history into an interactive multimodal user experience. All in all, it demonstrates that representing concepts is not just about the applied language of narrative and argumentation; it is also about the publication's form. Bodies and Structures 2.0, therefore, is an exciting work from the perspective of theory of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the book "Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas," by Clarice Lispector, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is presented.