Between (May 2014)
Il volto velato. Iperbole e reticenza in Howard Phillips Lovecraft, e nel racconto fantastico e d’orrore otto-novecentesco
Abstract
This paper analyses some of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), considering them as part of a certain line of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantastic genre and horror literature. This literary tradition plays with – and reflects on – the rhetorical devices of hyperbole and reticence. In the texts examined by the author, what cannot be represented is chased throughout the story and is finally revealed, but only to leave room for an irresolvable ambiguity. It is as if the hyperbole, by pushing language beyond its extreme limit, would suddenly turn into reticence. The last horror, unnameable and unthinkable, is nothing more than an empty signifier.
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