Literary ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism
Subtitle: the haunting interval
By: Luke Thurston
Series: Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature -- 27
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780415509664
Subjects: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General; English literature; Theory; History and criticism; Ghosts in literature; Modernism (Literature); LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; LITERARY CRITICISM / Gothic & Romance
Description: This book resituates the ghost story as a matter of literary hospitality and as part of a vital prehistory of modernism, seeing it not as a quaint neo-gothic ornament, but as a powerful literary response to the technological and psychological disturbances that marked the end of the Victorian era. Linking little-studied authors like M. R. James and May Sinclair to such canonical figures as Dickens, Henry James, Woolf, and Joyce, Thurston argues that the literary ghost should be seen as no mere relic of gothic style but as a portal of discovery, an opening onto the central modernist problem of how to write 'life itself'. Ghost stories should be seen as a distinctly neo-gothic genre, and as such are split between an ironic, often parodic reference to Gothic style and an evocation of 'life itself,' an implicit repudiation of all literary style. Reading the ghost story as both a guest and a host story, this book traces the ghost as a disruptive figure in the 'hospitable' space of narrative from Maturin, Poe and Dickens to the fin de siècle, and then on into the twentieth century. --
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: Beyond my notation; title: Pt. 1. Literary hospitality; title: The spark of life; title: Zigzag: the Signalman; title: Pt. 2. Guests ? Ghosts; title: Broken lineage: M. R. James; title: Ineffaceable life: Henry James; title: Pt. 3. Hosts of the living; title: A loop in a mesh: May Sinclair; title: Distant music: Woolf, Joyce; title: Double-crossing: Elizabeth Bowen; title: Conclusion: the ghostly path.