Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism The Haunting Interval [Hardcover]

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 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 guestand a hoststory, 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.

Introduction: Beyond My Notation Part I: Literary Hospitality 1. The Spark of Life 2. Zigzag: The SignalmanPart II: Guests/Ghosts 3. Broken Lineage: M. R. James 4. Ineffaceable Life: Henry James Part III: Hosts Of The Living 5. A Loop in a Mesh: May Sinclair 6. Distant Music: Woolf, Joyce Conclusion: The Haunting Interval

A terrific book, tightly-argued, highly-disciplined, constantly making interconnections of a convincing kind between the examples; never obscure or wandering from the point, often witty and sharp in observation and deduction  a brilliant account of what goes on and whats at stake when the ghost gets into the machine of narrative. - Professor Peter Barry, author ofBeginning Theory

Literary Ghostsis a courageous book, unafraid to make room for the voices of capital-T Theory withlÃÕ