Retracing the Gothic Romance: Instances of Transtextuality in Gaston Leroux’s Le fantôme de l’opéra and Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos

Abstract

This article aims to offer a comparative analysis between Gaston Leroux’s novel Le fantôme de l’opéra (1910) and Alejandro Amenábar’s film Abre los ojos (1997) in which Amenábar’s film will be interpreted as a postmodern adaptation of Leroux’s original novel. This analysis will also identify those traits pertaining to the Gothic tradition and the nineteenth-century Gothic romance as reflected in Leroux’s modernist approach and reinterpreted in Amenábar’s postmodern film on the basis of the notion of transtextuality.

Keywords

• Gothic tradition
• Byronic hero
• mask
• the double
• metaliterature