Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introduction: Modernism, Mourning, and the Ghostly

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Haunting Modernisms

  • 609 Accesses

Abstract

In this introductory chapter, Foley locates the argument of Haunting Modernisms in relation to three relevant scholarly fields: haunting studies, Gothic modernism, and mourning modernisms. The book’s parameters of enquiry are clearly drawn within the period c.1910–1930 and important authors to the study are introduced, including Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and D. H. Lawrence. Suggesting that modernism’s classical influences and its preference for a purgatorial aesthetics of finitude shape its stagings of the ghostly, this chapter also broadly articulates the study’s theoretical framing by relating the thought of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan to modernist models of haunting. Foley argues that understanding incarnations of purgatorial subjectivity, ghostliness, ontological uncertainty, and impossible mourning is essential to reading the complexities of spectrality as it is represented in the modernist aesthetic.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Abraham, Nicolas. 1994 [1974]. Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology. In The Shell and The Kernel: volume 1, ed. Nicholas T. Rand, 171–176. Chicago: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1994 [1972]. Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation. In The Shell and The Kernel: volume 1, ed. Nicholas T. Rand, 125–138. Chicago: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham (eds.). 2010. Introduction to Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction, xi–xxvi. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, Tim. 2005. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asquith, Cynthia. 1950. Haply I May Remember. London: James Barrie.

    Google Scholar 

  • Banerjee, Sheela. 2015. Interpretation and Reality: Anthropological Hauntings in The Waste Land. Modernism/Modernity 22 (2): 237–254.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. Spectral Poetics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. In Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality, ed. Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Walton, 153–168. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. 1995. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Berthin, Christine. 2010. Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Birkhead, Edith. 1921. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable & Company Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Peeren (eds.). 2010. Introduction to Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, ix–xxiv. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Breton, André. 2005. From the First Manifesto of Surrealism. In Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 718–741. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Briggs, Julia. 2006. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Byron, Glennis. 2003. Dramatic Monologue. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Castricano, Jodey. 2001. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. Montreal: McGill Queen University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Childs, Peter. 2000. Modernism. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clewell, Tammy. 2009. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Critchley, Simon. 1999. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dante. 1993 [1308–1321]. The Divine Comedy, ed. David H. Higgins, trans. C.H. Sissons. Oxford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darvay, Daniel. 2016. Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, Ann. 2016. Contemporary Spanish Gothic. Edinburgh: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, Colin. 2007. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1986. “Fors.” In The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ed. Nicholas Rand, trans. Barbara Johnson, xi–iil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1989. Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2000 [1989]. Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006 [1993]. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Detloff, Madelyn. 2009. The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eliot, T.S. 1974a. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1974b [1915]. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In Collected Poems 1909–1962, 3–7. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1974c [1922]. The Waste Land. In Collected Poems 1909–1962, 51–79. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellmann, Maud. 1987. The Poetics of Impersonality. Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fink, Bruce. 2002. Knowledge and Jouissance. In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, 21–46, Albany: University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fraser, Graham. 2008. ‘No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work. In Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity, ed. John Paul Riquelme, 168–179, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freud, Sigmund. 1984. The Penguin Freud Library, ed. Angela Richards and Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey, 14 vols. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gay, Peter. 2007. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy form Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond. London: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibbons, Luke. 2016. Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory. Chicago: University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226236209.001.0001.

  • Gilbert, Sandra M. 1999. ‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy. New Literary History 30 (1): 179–201.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glendinning, Victoria. 1993 [1977]. Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer. London: Orion Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldman, Jane. 2004. Modernism 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Harries, Martin. 2010. Beckett’s Ghost Light. In Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 19–34. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hepburn, Allan. 2010. French Translations: Elizabeth Bowen and the Idea of Character. University of Toronto Quarterly 79 (4): 1054–1063.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 2001. Strolling in the Dark: Gothic Flânerie in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. In Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, 78–94. Houndmills: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jalland, Pat. 2010. Death in War and Peace: A History of Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970. Oxford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Joyce, James. 2000 [1922]. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kermode, Frank. 1973. Lawrence. London: Fontana.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. 1977 [1959]. Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet. Yale French Studies 55/56: 11–52.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1979 [1964]. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester. Cambridge: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006 [1966]. Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laing, R. D. 1969 [1959]. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levenson, Michael. 1986. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. Cambridge: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998 [1991]. The Other, Utopia and Justice. In On Thinking-Of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, 223–233. London: The Athlone Press Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lukacher, Ned. 1986. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McIntire, Gabrielle. 2008. Modernism, Memory and Desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Kingston, ON: Queens University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Proust, Marcel. 1996 [1913]. Volume 1: Swann’s Way, in In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright, 6 vols. London: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Punter, David. 2001. Hungry Ghosts and Foreign Bodies. In Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, 11–28. Houndmills: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 1996. The Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville, FL: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rae, Patricia (ed.). 2007. Introduction. In Modernism and Mourning, 13–49. New Jersey: Associated University Presses.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ramazani, Jahan. 1999 [1994]. Poetry of Mourning: the modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rosenthal, Lecia. 2011. Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation. Fordham: University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ross, Stephen. 2009. Uncanny Modernism. In Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela L. Caughie, 33–52. Houndmills: Palgrave.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008. Clipping. Forum, 7. http://www.forumjournal.org/site/issue/07/professor-nicholas-royle. Accessed 2 Aug 2010.

  • Sherry, Vincent. 2003. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Andrew. 2010. The ghost story, 1840–1920: A cultural history. Manchester: University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Andrew, and Jeff Wallace (eds.). 2001. Introduction. In Gothic Modernisms, 1–10. Houndmills: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Stan. 2007. Proper Frontiers: Transgression and the Individual Talent. In T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding, 22–40. Cambridge: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stevenson, Randall. 1998 [1992]. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction, rev. ed. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sword, Helen. 2002. Ghostwriting Modernism. Cornell: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thurston, Luke. 2012. Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Torok, Maria 1994 [1968]. The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse. In The Shell and The Kernel: volume 1, ed. Nicholas Rand, 107–124. Chicago: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vine, Steven. 2011. Ecstatic or Terrible: The Waste Land’s ‘Criterion of ‘Sublimity’’. English 60 (228): 45–65.

    Google Scholar 

  • Warwick, Alexandra. 2007. Feeling Gothicky? Gothic Studies 9 (1): 5–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilt, Judith. 2001. The Ghost and Omnibus: the Gothic Virginia Woolf. In Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, 62–77. Houndmills: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambridge: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolfreys, Julian. 2002. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Woolf, Virginia. 1967 [1930]. Street Haunting. In Collected Essays: Volume 4, ed. Leonard Woolf, 155–166. London: The Hogarth Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1988b [1920]. Gothic Romance. In Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 304–307. New York: Harcourt.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1988c [1921]. ‘Henry James’ Ghost Stories. In Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 319–326. New York: Harcourt.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006 [1927]. To the Lighthouse. Oxford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stirling, UK

    Matt Foley

Authors
  1. Matt Foley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matt Foley .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Foley, M. (2017). Introduction: Modernism, Mourning, and the Ghostly. In: Haunting Modernisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65485-0_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation