Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

The Familiar - Original Edition Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

the stories in the collection are exceptionally grim tales of haunted individuals, retributive ghosts, mysterious pathologies and suicide. The stories considered in this thesis are tied together by remarkable similarities in point of narrative structure, characters and plots, as well as motifs and thematic threads. Framed as clinical case studies, all three tales challenge the reliability of scientific explanations and posit a world in which the supernatural element easily intrudes into the psyche of the protagonists.