ABSTRACT
The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. The souls in Dante's Inferno, or the supernatural apparitions in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than Homer's jovial world of gods. The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. The imaginative writer has the licence among many others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities people are familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases.
