Paysage en ruine et voyage au service du fantastique: .à propos d’Inès de las Sierras

Abstract

Charles Nodier’s Inés de las Sierras, a story set in Spain, features two elements which represent key components of the fictional world of the author and which are often concurrent in nineteenth-century prose, namely, the tale and the fantastic. The present paper analyses three organising devices of the fantastic in this tale: firstly, the use of historically grounded, spatiotemporal references that lend verisimilitude to the events narrated; secondly, the role of the journey as a structuring factor in the discourse of fantasy literature; and thirdly, Ghismondo Castle ruins. The role of the ruins -it will be argued- is twofold. In addition to setting a Gothic backdrop for the coming of the irrational, which is arguably the more obvious function, they bear a moral significance that transcends the purely visual realm.