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The Spectre of the Self in Frankenstein and Great Expectations

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The Victorian Fantasists
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Abstract

In 1968, Roland Barthes proclaimed the ‘death of the author’:

Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. (168)

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© 1991 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Filmer, K. (1991). The Spectre of the Self in Frankenstein and Great Expectations. In: Filmer, K. (eds) The Victorian Fantasists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21277-4_12

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