From supernatural to psychological : a historical study of the concept of the 'Fantastic' in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ and Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

الملخص EN

This research paper explores how and why the existing tradition of supernatural stories about ghosts and other fantastical creatures, which located terror as an external factor in these unnatural and malignant beings, was transformed in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century into tales that are instead focused on fear in terms of the internal psychology of the narrator and the protagonist.

It investigates two well-known examples of psychological horror, E.TA.

Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843).