It is easy to see how the novel’s intricate Chinese-box structure, its narratological complexity or its Faustian play on good and evil would appeal to a young scholar, just as the portrait with uncanny eyes was bound to fascinate a pioneer of intersemioticity. Hubert Teyssandier kept his chapter on Maturin when he turned the thesis into a book and the section on Maturin and Mary Shelley was republished under the title Cercles infernaux in 1993. Maturin, a poor Irish vicar who certainly was not part of the canon, was among the writers that he chose to explore, along with Austen or Scott, for his doctoral thesis (this was most unusual, and perhaps partly inspired by Maurice Lévy’s major work, Le Roman “gothique” anglais 1764-1824, published in 1968). The “abnormal persistence of the past within the present”, which Hubert Teyssandier lays stress on, may be read as a supernatural sign of evil, but also as a metaphor of intertextuality and historical trauma.ģ Hubert Teyssandier tends to be associated with writers like Henry James, George Eliot or Virginia Woolf rather than with the violence of the early Gothic yet he returned to Melmoth at least three times in his career. The mysterious gaze follows the viewer as if the portrait came to life, as Hubert Teyssandier points out:ĭans le débarras encombré où le jeune Melmoth le découvre, le portrait au regard terrifiant apparaît comme la survie anormale du passé dans le présent, et, de surcroît, cette représentation picturale est celle d’un homme qui, ayant échappé mystérieusement à la mort, continue à hanter le monde de sa présence toujours vivante : « the original is still alive » (Teyssandier 1993, 48)Ģ The uncanny portrait foreshadows the way in which the cursed protagonist travels across time and space throughout the novel.

In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.1C harles Robert Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer opens with a striking Gothic trope, a painting that introduces the doomed wanderer to his naïve descendent-and thereby to the reader. First published 27 September 2007 3663 Melmoth the Wanderer 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions. You are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal Offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address.

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Maturin melmoth the wanderer