Literary ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism [electronic resource] : the haunting interval / Luke Thurston.
Thurston, Luke.
2012
PR478.M6 T48 2012
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Title Literary ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism [electronic resource] : the haunting interval / Luke Thurston.
Author Thurston, Luke.
ISBN 9780415509664
9780203112496 (electronic book)
Imprint New York : Routledge, 2012.
Language English
Description 186 p. : ill.
Call Number PR478.M6 T48 2012
Dewey Decimal Classification 823/.087330908
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 siècle, and then on into the twentieth century. -- Source other than Library of Congress.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Series Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; 27
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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.

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