Literary notes about Spectral (AI summary)
The term "spectral" in literature is often employed to evoke an ethereal, ghostlike quality that blurs the line between reality and imagination. It can describe physical manifestations—such as eerie apparitions, phantasmal figures, or hazy landscapes that seem to waver in and out of view ([1], [2], [3])—while also conveying intangible mental or emotional disturbances, as when thoughts or memories take on an almost ghostly presence ([4], [5]). Authors frequently use it to lend a sense of otherworldliness, imbuing both characters and settings with a subdued, almost hallucinatory quality that enhances the mysterious or unsettling atmosphere of a narrative ([6], [7], [8]).
- They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral.
— from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle - Or a spectral hound, black, silent, and monstrous?
— from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle - A spectral mist hung suspended a few feet over the lake; beneath it the water was like a steel cuirass, reflecting bordering foliage as black as jet.
— from Two on the Trail: A Story of the Far Northwest by Hulbert Footner - "I think it a case of spectral illusion: I fear, following on and resulting from long-continued mental conflict."
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë - This is living reason, and compared with it material causes and logical necessities are spectral things.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James - How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
— from Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad - The firelight flickered on the wall and beyond the window a spectral dusk was gathering upon the river.
— from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - Spectral or not, here truly was nothing frightful, and I advanced.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë
