TY - JOUR TI - “Some ghostly Queen of Spades”: John Keats’s images of spectrality AU - Łuczyńska-Hołdys, Małgorzata TI - “Some ghostly Queen of Spades”: John Keats’s images of spectrality AB - In the present paper I aim at exploring Keats’s use of Gothic and grotesque images in his three famous poems: “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”, “The Eve of Saint Agnes” and the unfinished “The Eve of St. Mark”. I argue that there is a consistent pattern of imagery in Keats’s poetry that combines these two categories, and this imagery revolves around an idea of a spectral presence, or a “life-in-death” existence. The mingling of these two literary and aesthetic modes allows for a powerful articulation of anxieties relating to mortality, confrontation with the inevitability of death and decay of the human body, and the uneasy, tentative hope for the afterlife. VL - First View (2024) IS - Volume 19, Issue 2 SN - 1897-3035 C1 - 2084-3933 UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/studia-litteraria-uic/artykul/some-ghostly-queen-of-spades-john-keatss-images-of-spectrality