| Contents |
1. The fantastic in the cultural history of reading ; Cazotte's Le diable amoureux and Hoffmann's "Der Elementargeist" ; The Devil in love ; "Che Vuoi?" ; The glance behind the lure ; "The elementary spirit" ; Seduction through reading ; The passion of the lonely reader ; Manly valor and bachelordom by choice -- 2. The aesthetics of shock and the poetics of the perverse ; Paranoid Eckbert, melancholy Emil, and "the imp of the perverse" ; The limits of representation ; Blond Eckbert's paranoia ; Confessions gone awry: Eckbert's paranoia ; Bertha's story and the origin of sexuality ; "Rear window" or "love charm" ; The pathology of aesthetic subjectivity ; The love charm, the fantastic, and seduction by shock ; Between pathology and amorality: "the imp of the perverse" -- 3. The power of the artist ; Schmolling's insanity defense ; "Das Fräulein Von Scuderi" ; "Automata" and the simulation of life -- 4. Artificial paradise and the medial woman ; "Serapion," "Rat Krespel," "La morte amoureuse," and "Ligeia" ; Temporality, ideal beauty, and mortality ; Serapion: radical visionary bliss and the denial of the body's mortality ; "Councillor Krespel": narration and fantasy between two deaths, "La morte amoureuse" ; Ligeia: "her large and luminous orbs" ; Poe's arabesque, or, death by drapery ; "Hideous animation" -- 5. Fantastic encounters with the marvels of history ; "Isabella von Ägypten" and "La Vénus d'Ille" ; Bella's blood ; The political mixture of legend and history ; Isabella's sexuality and femininity ; The uses of blood ; The living past and its resistance to modernization ; "The Venus of Ille" ; The idol's looks and the idol's look ; The inspector's investment ; Signature, event, context: the narrator's blind spot -- Epilogue, or, turning the screw from shock to fascination. |
