Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture

Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach grounded in close reading, the text places Jacques Derrida's work on spectrality in dialogue with particular aspects of phenomenology. The volume explores writing and culture from the 1880s to the present day, proceeding through four sections examining related questions of identity, memory, the landscape, and our modern relationship to the past. Julian Wolfreys presents a theoretically informed understanding of the efficacy of literature and culture in connecting us to the past in an affective and engaged manner.

Applies Derrida's work on spectrality to a wide range of interdisciplinary texts Examines the interconnection of subject and place through the lens of phenomenological philosophy Links memory studies to Gothic, Victorian, and Neo-Victorian literature

Autorentext
Julian Wolfreys is Professor of English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and author and editor of numerous books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and literary theory. He is also the author of a novel, Silent Music (2014) and three volumes of poetry.

Inhalt

Introduction.- The Chapter Before the First: Dwelling and the Uncanny.- English Losses: Thomas Hardy and the Memory of Wessex.- All You Need is Love? Edward Thomas, Apostrophizing the Other.- 'A parallel dimension': The Haunted Streets and Spectral Poethics of the Neo-Victorian Novel.- 'Can you tell me where my country lies?': Re-membering, Re-presenting the Forgotten.- 'Chewing through your Wimpey dreams': Whimsy, Loss, and the 'experience' of the Rural in English Music and Art, 1966-1976.- 'And for a moment': Voicing the Landscape with Alice Oswald and John Burnside.- 'It was suddenly hard winter': Crossing the Field with John Burnside.- Place and Displacement: Julian Barnes and the Haunted Self.