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Author Thurston, Luke

Title Literary ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism : the haunting interval / Luke Thurston
Published New York : Routledge, 2012

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Description 1 online resource (186 pages) : illustrations
Series Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; 27
Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; 27.
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 siècle, and then on into the twentieth century. -- Source other than Library of Congress
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Universidad Sergio Arboleda
English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc
English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc
Modernism (Literature) -- Great Britain
Ghosts in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- Gothic & Romance.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- General.
English literature -- Theory, etc.
Ghosts in literature
Modernism (Literature)
Literatur
Englisch
Gespenst
Moderne
Engels.
Bellettrie.
Griezelverhalen.
Great Britain
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781136282485
1136282483
9780203112496
0203112490
9781136282430
1136282432
9781136282478
1136282475
9781138016217
1138016217
1283643170
9781283643177