“Old hell transformed into a new purgatory”: the disturbing historical experience in the novel “The Haunted Hotel” by Wilkie Collins
... for representing the meaning of historical events through the depiction of a certain historical experience. It is precisely this historical experience (Franklin R. Ankersmitʼs term), along with the fragmentary Gothic narrative of Countess Narona, present in the story like a “dream within a dream”, that reveals the truth of this work with its puzzling ending. The story’s ending, which explicitly declares the impossibility of uncovering the “secret of the hotel,” functions as a trigger ...
