Authors:
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
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Poem, Subject, Place
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Front Matter
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Haunted Victoriographies, Late-Victorian and Neo-Victorian
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Front Matter
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Rural Hauntings, English Losses, Cultural Memory
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
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.
Reviews
“Well-researched, diverse, and comprehensive, Wolfreys’s thought-provoking interdisciplinary study opens up new ways of seeing ourselves and the world. A broad and wide-ranging monograph, Haunted Selves is a valuable contribution to English cultural and literary studies and is compelling reading for academics and non-academics alike. … Wolfreys invites readers to find new ways of understanding the poetics of space, self, and memory in a study that is a superb tribute to storytelling, celebrating the enduring power of literature … .” (Monika Kosa, Victoriographies, Vol. 11 (2), July, 2021)
“A book to make you revisit your own intimate, embodied experience of reading and remembering. Wolfreys’ take on collective memory is an enamoured song in which we heed the music of place, fantasmatic and embodied, spectral and urgent, residual and of the future. There is, for Wolfreys, no interpretation outside experience and Haunted Selves complexifies his apperception of the unique event literature opens us to: an indwelling and experience that opens us to loss and to being, to being as loss. A meditation on the music of the land and a reflexion of the spectrality of the reading experience, Haunted Selves reveals collective memory to be an experience that is ethical and embodied, political and aesthetic, political because it is intractably literary. To those pondering the future of theory and criticism, this is a must-read for any reader convinced of the transforming power of literature.” (Catherine Bernard, Professor of English Literature and Art History, Paris Diderot University, France)
“Haunted Selves is markedly distinguished and distinctive book. It adds itself to the long series of admirable books that Julian Wolfreys has published over the years. Haunted Selves centers on readings of work by Thomas Hardy and those writers who come after Hardy in the twentieth century, especially the so-called ‘neo-Victorians’ and their contemporaries, from Edward Thomas, Sarah Waters, Peter Ackroyd, Peter Carey, and Charles Palliser, all the way down to Alice Oswald, John Burnside, and Julian Barnes. The chapter on Hardy’s poetry, for example, is surely one of the best essays ever written on that topic. Nevertheless, an even stronger and more original aspect of Haunted Selves is the brilliant prolonged meditation on a complex tangle of inter-related theoretical issues. This meditation is carried on from chapter to chapter. It is inspired by many recent theorists (Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, and others). The issues investigated include haunting, ghosts, spectrality, the uncanny, self and place, self in place, scene, rural experience, memory, re-presentation, the trace, Being, and so on. Julian Wolfreys’ ‘take’ on these topics in their mutual inherence is powerful and impressively original.” (J. Hillis Miller, UCI Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, University of California at Irvine, USA)
“This is a beautifully written, captivating, and thought provoking book. Through literature, poetry and philosophy it takes us on a profound journey from the 1880s to the present day to reveal the ways in which our memories and identities are shaped by the landscapes, places and spaces of the past, and how our everyday lives are haunted by the unfamiliar.” (Professor Nicole Anderson, Macquarie University, Australia and Editor-in-Chief of Derrida Today Journal)Authors and Affiliations
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University of Portsmouth, Bembridge, UK
Julian Wolfreys
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture
Book Subtitle: 1800–Present
Authors: Julian Wolfreys
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98089-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-98088-1Published: 06 November 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07450-0Published: 26 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-98089-8Published: 24 October 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 258
Topics: Gothic Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary Theory