Haunting Modernisms : Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism

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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xii Introduction: Modernism, Mourning, and the Ghostly (Matt Foley)....Pages 1-43 Front Matter ....Pages 45-45 Haunted Images, Deadness, and Impossible Mourning (Matt Foley)....Pages 47-80 Melancholia and the Dead in T. S. Eliot’s Aesthetics of Purgatory (Matt Foley)....Pages 81-110 Front Matter ....Pages 111-111 Pursuing the Phantom in Woolf’s Aesthetics of Survival (Matt Foley)....Pages 113-137 The Gaze in Elizabeth Bowen’s Spectral Resistance Fantasies (Matt Foley)....Pages 139-165 Front Matter ....Pages 167-167 The Blood-Consciousness and Lawrence’s Silent Ghosts (Matt Foley)....Pages 169-204 Conclusion: The other/Other and Locating the Ghostly (Matt Foley)....Pages 205-215 Back Matter ....Pages 217-222