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The mystery stories, ‘The Red Room’, by H. ... Jacobs, are typical of Nineteenth century short stories that grip the reader by using suspense and tension. Horror stories of the Victorian era incorporated strict literary conventions to bring the reader to believing the mystery are true. The Victorian period was an age of enlightenment where people witnessed a huge advance in scientific knowledge. ... These pre-twentieth century short stories were effective as they played on the conflict between the faith and doubt. ...
The authors of these short stories use strict literary conventions such as using isolation, age barriers, weather and emphasised character descriptions to build up tension and suspense.
The younger generations in Victorian society are represented in the three short stories as the investigators and the ones who ridicule the beliefs of the older generation as nonsense. The older generations are shown as the characters that enforce the supernatural stories and try to scare the youth into believing the ghost stories. ...
This isolation is similar between all three short stories. ...
The settings for the three short stories have been designed to appear as isolated places because isolation produces the effect of suspense as the reader anticipates a fatal event that unnerves them. ... ” This quote shows the authors use of social context as he portrays the period’s youth and their reluctance to believe in ghost stories. ...
The use of warnings is used in all of the three short stories. ... This is portrayed in the three stories by having all the non-believers as younger men, of the age of thirty and below, and the believers as the older generation and even spirits themselves. ...
The last convention used to build up suspense is the way the stories are left open at their endings. ... This leaves the reader wondering if the spiritual world does exist and as it is never told in these stories, the reader wants to know, and the events of this story stay in the mind of the reader, making it a very effective convention.
These three short stories from pre-twentieth century build suspense and tension by using isolation, the contrast in beliefs between the young and old, the use of warnings, the use of unnatural settings and weather, tales of previous disasters and ambiguous endings.
Approximate Word count = 1854
Approximate Pages = 7.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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