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Abstract

In their article "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics," Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco García Jurado propose that although Gothic literature usually relegates the theme of love to the background, devoting most of its attention to the supernatural and to darkness, there are also literary texts in which love is mixed with life beyond the grave. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse (1836), the story of a vampire who comes back to life in her "undead" condition in order to seduce a priest. The theme of love and death awakened great interest among the Romantics, but this is not unique to modern literature: Greco-Roman writers had already dealt successfully with this topic and modern authors used this to create their own fictions. González-Rivas Fernández and García Jurado analyze how modern authors of Gothic narratives read certain ancient texts regarding love and death and how they use them in their own narratives: they establish a complex relationship between ancient and modern texts that transcends mere imitation or inspiration. González-Rivas Fernández and García Jurado discuss the case of Poe, whose texts "Berenice" and "Ligeia" are based on particular readings of previous narratives of ancient as well as mysterious origin and they analyze the re-reading of Poe by Marcel Schwob.

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