Simultaneous Immediacy in Two Stories by Daphne du Maurier: “The Birds” and “The Split Second”
This article examines Daphne du Maurier as a writer of popular-fiction genres, concentrating in particular on two stories from Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1953), the (enriched) American edition of her collection The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories (Gollancz, 1952)—the Gothic story “T...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2023
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | This article examines Daphne du Maurier as a writer of popular-fiction genres, concentrating in particular on two stories from Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1953), the (enriched) American edition of her collection The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories (Gollancz, 1952)—the Gothic story “The Birds” and the time-travel story “The Split Second.” The Gothic and time-travel genres are worth studying together because they share a central mechanism involving time categories. The Gothic and time-travel mechanism places opposed time categories in simultaneous immediacy (or simultaneous present-ness). In her stories, du Maurier uses this mechanism to position flexible and inflexible characters on the threshold of time categories. Through this positioning, she defines the “modern” category in relation to her characters’ anxiety over its loss. |
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