Ukleta kuća u “Padu kuće Usher” E. A. Poea i Prokletstvu kuće Hill Shirley Jackson

This paper deals with the portrayal and role of the haunted house in Gothic literature, specifically in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. The idea of the paper is to introduce the haunted house as a prevailing Gothic element that can obtain the role of a central character in the literary text and therefore simultaneously appear as an object and its personified form. Even though Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House share the dominant idea of a house as a central character, the authors treated this concept in a different manner that greatly contributed to the complexity of the narrative and correlation with other Gothic elements. Following a theoretical explanation of Gothic literature as a literary genre that conjoins elements such as fear, tragedy, love, and the uncanny, the detailed analysis will elaborate on the use of haunted houses in Poe’s and Jackson’s work, in order to show that Poe’s haunting experiences are not directly connected with the characters’ past and include the use of the uncanny elements, whereas Jackson’s hauntings stem directly from Eleanor’s trauma