Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the construction of the text world created in Christabel by T. S. Coleridge through the particular style used by the narrator to tell about the encounter between Christabel – the apparent Christ-like ‘victim’ – and the beautiful, snake-woman Geraldine, who seduces her. The goal is to bring out the rhetorical structures and the narrative-discursive ways through which the text builds a phantasmagorical and non-realistic scenario. The analytic model in use in this analysis draws on text linguistics and stylistics complemented by concepts and theories inspired by logic and philosophy of language.