The Uncanny

The Uncanny Literary Elements

Genre

Psychoanalysis; literary criticism

Setting and Context

Narrator and Point of View

Tone and Mood

Protagonist and Antagonist

Major Conflict

Climax

Foreshadowing

Understatement

Allusions

Numerous allusions to works of literature, especially 19th-century German literature (as explained in the section on Freud and Literature)

Imagery

Paradox

The uncanny itself is fundamentally a kind of paradoxical feeling: familiarity combined with fear, knowledge combined with mystery, and fascination combined with repulsion

Parallelism

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Personification