The believable convergence of the Realistic and the Fantastic in three late Victorian Gothic novels

Abstract

Modernity, Narrative absorption, Literary Devices, Fin de siècle, Gothic, Contextualisation At the end of the 19th century, a subset of novels appeared that caught the attention of the public, critics, and other authors and, surprisingly, they continue to do so. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Dracula, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, are the three representative texts chosen for this study. What make these stories so interesting is not only the fact that they depart from their social context to include the fantastic or supernatural, but how successfully these novels managed to combine the realistic and the fantastic – to the point of blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Using a taxonomy and definitions based on Hakemulder, Kuijpers, Tan, Bálint, & Doicaru’s Narrative Absorption (2017), a set of ‘pre-requisites’ for reader absorption can be identified and their presence in the texts analysed through close reading cross referenced with both contemporary and modern reader reactions. These authors’ use of the situation model, flow, attention, mental imagery and emotional engagement was found to be not only very well executed, but carefully woven together with curiosity, suspense and surprise to craft stories that grab and hold the reader’s attention.