Full Description
This book is about haunting in modernist literature. Offering an extended and textually-sensitive reading of modernist spectrality that has yet to be undertaken by scholars of either haunting or modernism, it provides a fresh reconceptualization of modernist haunting by synthesizing recent critical work in the fields of haunting studies, Gothic modernisms, and mourning modernisms. The chapters read the form and function of the ghostly as it appears in the work of a constellation of important modernist contributors, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford. It is of particular significance to scholars and students in a wide range of fields of study, including modernism, literary theory, and the Gothic.
Contents
1. Introduction: modernism, mourning, and the ghostly.- 2. Haunted images, deadness, and impossible mourning.- 3. Melancholia and the dead in T. S. Eliot's aesthetics of purgatory.- 4. Pursuing the phantom in Woolf's aesthetics of survival.- 5. The gaze in Elizabeth Bowen's spectral resistance fantasies.- 6. The blood consciousness and Lawrence's silent ghosts.- 7. Conclusion: The other/Other and locating the ghostly.- Index.
