Abstract
Monstrous, malefic spiders are a staple in Gothic, supernatural, horror, and fantasy fiction: from Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (1842) and Erckmann-Chatrian’s The Crab Spider (1847), to the man-eating spider of Bertram Mitford’s The Sign of the Spider (1896) and the outsized offspring in M. R. James’s The Ash-Tree (1904), through to modern manifestations such as Shelob in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954) and the titular terror of Stephen King’s It (1986), uncanny arachnids have proven to be perennially popular. One such story has recently reappeared after well over a century of neglect: Ernest G. Henham’s novel, Tenebrae (1898). Republished in 2013, the time is ripe for reappraisal, and this essay presents a close reading of the novel and an examination of its relationship to the Gothic tradition.
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Grant, P.B. (2020). ‘Most Hideous of Gaolers’: The Spider in Ernest G. Henham’s Tenebrae. In: Heholt, R., Edmundson, M. (eds) Gothic Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_3
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