SOURCE: Stoddart, Helen. “Isak Dinesen and the Fiction of Gothic Gravity.” In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 81-8. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Stoddart underscores the importance of storytelling and elucidates the theme of gravity in the stories of Seven Gothic Tales.

There is really no getting away from the business of story-telling in Seven Gothic Tales.¹ The emphasis on the importance of the telling of tales is precisely and continuously foregrounded and this is the first aspect of the text I'd like to look at in this essay. It is frequently the subject for self-reflexive contemplation as the tales debate and discuss the pleasure, pain, poverty, or wealth which may be at stake behind the labour of just getting the tale told. But this thematic also has a knock-on effect on the way we read the...