TY - JOUR AU - Stefano Lazzarin PY - 2014/05/30 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - The Veiled Face: Hyperbole and Reticence in Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Fantastic Genre and Horror Literature JF - Between JA - BW VL - 4 IS - 7 SE - Telling, Hesitating, Envisaging. Sites of the uncanny DO - 10.13125/2039-6597/1072 UR - https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/1072 AB - This paper analyses some of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), considering them as part of a certain line of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantastic genre and horror literature. This literary tradition plays with – and reflects on – the rhetorical devices of hyperbole and reticence. In the texts examined by the author, what cannot be represented is chased throughout the story and is finally revealed, but only to leave room for an irresolvable ambiguity. It is as if the hyperbole, by pushing language beyond its extreme limit, would suddenly turn into reticence. The last horror, unnameable and unthinkable, is nothing more than an empty signifier. ER -