Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, the revival of the fantastique drew largely upon the clinical study of the life of the mind to inspire the fear and astonishment of a reader confronted with a henceforth naturalized supernatural. Taking as a point of departure the “study of demented thought” put forth in Jules Lermina’s Histoires incroyables (1885), this article intends to show that the blurring of the normal and the pathological (Broussais’s hypothesis), but also of the voluntary and the involuntary (Baillarger’s hypothesis), became veritable poetic forces in numerous ‘fin de siècle’ narratives.

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