Abstract
In 1921 Virginia Woolf, writing of that generation we call ‘modernist’, warns the aspiring ghost story writer that ’your ghosts will only make us laugh’ if they simply aim at the obvious sources of fear. For after world war, tabloid journalism and mass mechanical production ’we breakfast upon a richer feast of horror than served our ancestors for a twelvemonth … we are impervious to fear.’ It only remains for us modernist writers, Woolf notes, to change the point of attack, to find ’the weak spot in the armour’ of the impervious modern mind, to specify a new fear.1
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Wilt, J. (2001). The Ghost and the Omnibus: the Gothic Virginia Woolf. In: Smith, A., Wallace, J. (eds) Gothic Modernisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985236_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985236_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42365-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-333-98523-6
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