The Ghostly Spirit’s Myth in Catalan «Modernisme»: transposition, unreality, and beliefs

Abstract

This paper, being a contribution to the rarely studied fantastic literature written in Catalan, is an approach to two of the essential motifs of this literary mode — ghosts and embodied spirits. On the grounds of an interdisciplinary theoretical basis dealing with the human function of imagining, the objective of this paper is to analyze a small corpus of short story fiction written during the period of Catalan Modernisme. The unreal elements of these works determine which is their narrative mode and how their stories work. The corpus comprises two quite opposite short stories: one by M. Genís i Aguilar and the other one by J. Zanné. The aesthetic, ideological and religious aspects conditioning the rewritings of the myths or hypotexts are examined by applying several notions related to Genette’s literary hipertextuality.