Wolfreys Julian. Haunted Selves Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture: 1800 - Present

Palgrave Macmillan; Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2018. — x, 258 p. — ISBN 978-3-319-98088-1.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.Introduction.
The Chapter Before the First: Dwelling and the Uncanny.
Poem, Subject, Place.
English Losses: Thomas Hardy and the Memory of Wessex.
All You Need Is Love? Edward Thomas, Apostrophizing the Other.
Haunted Victoriographies, Late-Victorian and Neo-Victorian.
‘A parallel dimension’: The Haunted Streets and Spectral Poethics of the Neo-Victorian Novel.
Rural Hauntings, English Losses, Cultural Memory.
‘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.
Voices in a Landscape.
‘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.
Afterword.
Bibliography.
Index.