Victorian Hauntings

Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature

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by Julian Wolfreys

Palgrave

Due/Published February 2002, 240 pages, paper

ISBN 0333922522

What does it mean to read or write with ghosts, or to suggest that acts of reading or writing are haunted? How can 19th century authors be read to acknowledge the various phantom effects which return within their texts? In what ways do the traces of such "ghost writing" surface in the works of Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot, and Hardy? Beginning with an exploration of hauntings, the uncanny, the gothic, and the spectral, Julian Wolfreys traces the ghostly resonances at work in Victorian writing and how such persistence addresses the issues of memory and responsibility which literally haunt the work of reading.