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Palgrave Macmillan

Haunting Modernisms

Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Authors:
  1. Matt Foley

    1. Stirling, United Kingdom

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  • Contributes significantly to understanding the models of selfhood and of living after loss that appear consistently in literary modernism

  • Focuses on several of the key literary forms of the period – including the short story, Imagist poetry, and narratives of interiority in the novel

  • Reads both canonical texts and overlooked works

  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
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  2. Introduction: Modernism, Mourning, and the Ghostly

    • Matt Foley
    Pages 1-43

  3. Spectrality, the Dead and Modernist Finitude

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 45-45
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    2. Haunted Images, Deadness, and Impossible Mourning

      • Matt Foley
      Pages 47-80

    3. Melancholia and the Dead in T. S. Eliot’s Aesthetics of Purgatory

      • Matt Foley
      Pages 81-110

  4. Phantoms, Survivors, and Resistance Fantasies

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 111-111
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    2. Pursuing the Phantom in Woolf’s Aesthetics of Survival

      • Matt Foley
      Pages 113-137

    3. The Gaze in Elizabeth Bowen’s Spectral Resistance Fantasies

      • Matt Foley
      Pages 139-165

  5. Beyond Finitude and Modernist others/Others

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 167-167
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    2. The Blood-Consciousness and Lawrence’s Silent Ghosts

      • Matt Foley
      Pages 169-204

    3. Conclusion: The other/Other and Locating the Ghostly

      • Matt Foley
      Pages 205-215

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 217-222
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Keywords

About this book

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.    


Reviews

“Haunting Modernisms attempts to bridge the gap between Gothic and Modernist definitions of what it means to haunt and be haunted. … Each chapter sows the seeds of discussions yet to come, creating a rich and complex study that draws together both theoretical and historical approaches.” (Lucy Hall, Fantastika Journal, Vol. 3 (4), January, 2019)​ “This book constitutes a timely critical intervention, offering highly significant new perspectives on Derridean hauntology, on the relation between spectrality and criticism, and on developments within modernism and ways of thinking about its relation to earlier cultural formations. It is a dazzling achievement that will be hugely influential.” (Dr Luke Thurston, Aberystwyth University, UK)

“Haunting Modernisms offers a wonderfully rich and engaging re-examination of modernist texts. Through carefully theorised analyses of mourning, spectrality and otherness, it breathes new critical and ethical life into ghostly tropes. It presents challenges, too, not only setting modernist wolves amongst gothic sheep, but tracking the effects of those darker historical forms and energies that mere modernity cannot kill.” (Professor Fred Botting, Kingston University, UK)

“Haunting Modernisms undertakes a long overdue project of theoretically informed close readings of key modernist texts in terms of their pervasive spectrality. Foley's treatment of the spectral as a form of impasse in modernism suddenly brings new interpretive and ethical vistas into view. This book is sure to become a touchstone in the field.” (Professor Stephen Ross, University of Victoria, Canada)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Stirling, United Kingdom

    Matt Foley

About the author

Matt Foley has particular research interests in modernism, the Gothic, the ghost story and literary acoustics. From 2015-2017, he held a Lectureship at the University of Stirling, UK, where he taught on a range of courses in modern and contemporary literature. He is currently writing on a diverse range of topics, including the acoustics of Gothic literature and the fiction of Michel Faber and Patrick McGrath. Haunting Modernisms is his first monograph.    

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