Module Information

Haunting Texts will introduce students to the ghost story as a distinct literary genre, one that emerges in the early nineteenth century and becomes a dominant literary form in Britain from around 1850 until the First World War. The emergence of the ghost story will be linked to specific historical conditions in the Victorian era - an expanding readership, magazine publication, scientific developments, the cultural displacement of religious tradition - and also to a corresponding set of debates amongst Victorian itellectuals and writers about the supernatural and its literary treatment. The module begins by exploring theoretical reflections on the supernatural in the late Gothic tradition exemplified by Radcliffe and Scott, before moving on to the Victorian ghost story proper (Le Fanu, Dickens, Collins, Edwards, Lee). The reading for each week includes critical and theoretical commentaries, allowing students to focus on various aspects of the ghost story - vision, gender, location, fantasy, the uncanny, colonialism. The transition from the Victorian to the modern ghost story is traced in the work of M R James, whose texts dramatize the encounter of academic culture with the uncanny; and another James, this time Henry - will be seen to make the apparition in 'The Jolly Corner' into a self-reflexive question of writing itself. A terrifying story by May Sinclair will next be explored in terms of its intertextual dimension. Ghost stories from the 20th century will be read alongside theoretical reflections on the uncanny dimension of modernity and colonialism, leading to an exploration of the ghostly dimension of theory itself, especially as manifested in psychoanalysis.

Average Student Workload:
Contact time 20.5 hours
Reading and preparation: 100 hours
Independent study preparing assignments 79.5 hours

Week 1 Introduction: Gothic Revenants
Anne Radcliffe, 'On the Supernatural in Poetry' (1826) [e-text];
Walter Scott, The Tapestried Chamber (1829) [OBEGS 1-12];
'On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition' (1827) [e-text];
J. S. Le Fanu, An Account of Some strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (1853) [CGS 1-18]

Week 2 Victorian Phantoms
Charles Dickens, The Signalman (1866) [PBGS 91-104];
Wilkie Collins, Mrs Zant and the Ghost (1879) [CGS 30-58];
Julia Briggs, Nigh Visitors: the Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977);
Jill Matus, 'Trauma, Memory and Railway Disaster: the Dickensian Connection' (2001)

Week 3 Ghost Feelers
Edith Nesbit, Man-Size in Marble (1893) [OBEGS 125-36]
Vernon Lee, A Wicked Voice (1890 [OBEGS 87-108]
Mary Wilkins, The Lost Ghost (1903) [CGS 150-164]
Nick Freeman, 'E Nesbit's New Woman Gothic' [photocopy]

Week 4 Phantom or Phantasm?
Fitz-James O'Brien, What Was It? (1859) [PBGS 25-37]
Amelia B Edwards, the Phantom Coach (1864) [OBEGS 13-24] 'The New Pass (1873) [CGS, 74-85];
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain (1859) [PBGS];
Srdan Smajic, 'The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story' (2004)

Week 5 Uncanny Things
H G Wells, The red Room (1896), [OBEGS, 172-9];
Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House (1906), [OBEGS, 222-35];
Ralph Cram, In Kropfsberg Keep (1895) [CGS 141-9];
W W Jacobs, The Monkey's Paw (1902) [PBGS 231-42]
Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919)

Week 6 Ghosts and Scholars
M R James, 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad' (1904) [PBGS 261-80];
The Mezzotint (1904) [photocopy];
Ralph Harrington, 'So jarred were all my nerves: supernatural shock and traumatic terror in the ghost stories of M R James' [photocopy]

READING WEEK

Week 8 Ghosts of the Self
Henry James, the Jolly corner (1908) [PBGS 291-325]
Martha Banta, 'Henry James and 'The Others' [photocopy]

Week 9 Intertextual Haunting
May Sinclair, the Intercessor (1911)
H D Everett, The Next Heir (1920)
Richard Bleiler, 'May Sinclair's Supernatural Fiction'

Week 10 Modern Domestic Ghosts
A M Burrage, Smee (1931) [OBEGS, 377-86]
Elizabeth Bowen, Hand in Glove (1952) [OBEGS 444-52]
D K Broster, The Pestering (1932)
A S Byatt, The July Ghost (1987)

Week 11 Imperial Spectres
W Somerset Maugham, The Taipan (1922) [OBEGS, 283-8]
L P Hartley, A Visitor from Down Under (1926) [OBEGS, 307-21] plus
Module Summary and reflection with group discussion