Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Catholicism, Sacrilege, and the Modern Gothic

   • Daniel Darvay

   Pages 1-34

3. Labyrinths of Reason from Augustine to Wilde

   • Daniel Darvay

   Pages 35-69

4. Specters of Conrad: Espionage and the Modern West

   • Daniel Darvay

   Pages 71-96

5. The Haunted Museum: E.M. Forster, Italy, and the Grand Tour

   • Daniel Darvay

   Pages 97-129

6. Detectives of the Mind: Virginia Woolf and the Gothic Sublime

   • Daniel Darvay

   Pages 131-158

7. Dark Vibes: D.H. Lawrence and Occult Electricity

   • Daniel Darvay

   Pages 159-186

8. Conclusion

   • Daniel Darvay

   Pages 187-190

9. Back Matter

   Pages 191-218

   PDF

This book explores the complex relationship between British modernism and the Gothic tradition over several centuries of modern literary and cultural history. Illuminating the blind spots of Gothic criticism and expanding the range of cultural material that falls under the banner of this tradition, Daniel Darvay focuses on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British writers transform the artifice of Gothic ruins into building blocks for a distinctively modernist architecture of questions, concerns, images, and arguments. To make this argument, Darvay takes readers back to early exemplars of the genre thematically rooted in the English Reformation, tracing it through significant Victorian transformations to finally the modernist period. Through writers such as Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, this book ultimately expands the boundaries of the Gothic genre and provides a fresh, new approach to better understanding the modernist movement.

• Gothic
• Modernism
• Literature
• British
• Twentieth-century Literature
• British and Irish Literature

“I was most convinced by Darvay’s explanation of the gothic’s instrumentality for defining Englishness in opposition to a foreign and vestigial Catholicism. This cultural and historical framing permits Haunting Modernity to address the modern and the gothic in a manner that contributes illuminating texture to these aesthetic, cultural, and political ideas.” (Kate Holterhoff, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 61 (1), 2019)

“From sacrilege narratives and imperial Gothic, through to the mysteries of electricity, this book is packed with new insights, and is necessary reading for those interested in how Gothic pervades later cultures.” (David Punter, Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK)

“Daniel Darvay’s alert, thoughtful, and historically grounded exploration of a British modernism that links Wilde, Conrad, Forster, Woolf, and Lawrence, presents a literature parasited by echoes of the Gothic sublime, awed by subliminal auras, spurred by magnetic echoes, and inscribing allotropic traces of the undead. In this brilliant synthesis, a more plastic and capacious modernism emerges, crackling with electric phantoms and spectral illuminations.” (Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA)

“All that was spooky melts in modernity … . Though manifold and persistent, Modernist conjurations of Gothic forms have been, until now,significantly overlooked. This book elegantly brings to light an array of tropes and topics connecting and revitalizing the two forms. It is an engaging study that will, in this area, set the standard for critical works to come.” (Fred Botting, Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, Kingston University, UK)

• Department of English and Foreign Languages, Colorado State University–Pueblo , Pueblo, USA

  Daniel Darvay

Daniel Darvay is a Visiting Lecturer at Colorado State University—Pueblo, USA. His research interests include modern British literature, Gothic culture, and the history and theory of the novel.

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