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Author:

Thurston, Luke.

Title:

Literary ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism : the haunting interval / Luke Thurston.

Publisher:

Routledge,

Copyright Date:

2012

Description:

186 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Subject:

English literature--20th century--Theory, etc.--Theory, etc.
English literature--19th century--Theory, etc.--Theory, etc.
Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.
Ghosts in literature.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:

Prologue: Beyond my notation -- Pt. 1. Literary hospitality -- The spark of life -- Zigzag: the Signalman -- Pt. 2. Guests Ghosts -- Broken lineage: M. R. James -- Ineffaceable life: Henry James -- Pt. 3. Hosts of the living -- A loop in a mesh: May Sinclair -- Distant music: Woolf, Joyce -- Double-crossing: Elizabeth Bowen -- Conclusion: the ghostly path.

Summary:

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 si©·cle, and then on into the twentieth century. -- Source other than Library of Congress.

Series:

Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; 27

ISBN:

0415509661 (hardback)
9780415509664 (hardback)

OCLC:

(OCoLC)768171661

LCCN:

2011052172

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)