Abstract
Our study of Eros in fantasy will be based on seven short stories (A. Bierce's The Death of Halpin Frayser, Ch. Dickens's The Signalman, Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil, P. Highsmith's The Snail-Watcher, H. P. Lovecraft's The Festival, R. Matheson's Born of Man and Woman, E. A. Poe's The Black Cat) and two short excerpts from Gothic novels (M. G. Lewis's The Monk and A. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho) but occasional reference will be made to other works by these authors and also to Henry James, the Brontë sisters and Le Fanu. We will begin with a brief presentation of the Greek myth of Eros. The second part of this study will consider the problem of knowledge in relation to the erotic dimension of literary fantasies. We will turn to the different manifestations of Eros in fantasy and the process of attraction-repulsion in the third part of this study before examining, in our fourth and final part, two erotic motifs which, latently or overtly, introduce and erotic dimension. They have been used in a variety of texts and we will try to find them in the ones we have selected.
