Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face

The uncanny in literature is a little-explored area. It is not the supernatural, nor the fantastic, and it does not depend on gothic devices, although it often occurs along with these. It is essentially the realm of the in-between. When the inner and outer states unexpectedly correspond, for the protagonists of a fiction or for the reader, their conjunction engages hidden fears and desires, and the uncanny appears. This intersection of the larger culture, personal psychology and the ghosts of writing has various implications: in the American case these are sexual crisis and racial stereotyping, the terror of the wilderness, and of the deeper self. Like these, the uncanny is off to the side, something seen out of the corner of the eye; something perhaps that is not supposed to be seen at all. This book pursues these significant phantoms in the work of Brown, Poe, Wharton, James, and other great American evokers of disquiet in the reader. Allan Gardner Lloyd-Smith is the author of many articles on American fiction and of two books of literary criticism: "The Analysis of Motives" and "Eve Tempted".