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: Gothic to Ghost Story
Anne Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry' (1826) [e-text];
Walter Scott, ‘On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition' (1827) [e-text];
Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852) [PGS 3-24];
J. S. Le Fanu, Squire Toby’s Will (1868) [OGS 25-50]


Week 2: Victorian Phantoms: Transport and Trauma
Charles Dickens, The Signalman (1866) [PGS 91-104];
Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Zant and the Ghost (1879) [CGS 30-58];
Jill Matus, ‘Trauma, Memory and Railway Disaster: the Dickensian Connection' (2001)


Week 3: Ghost Feelers: Gender and Genre
Margaret Oliphant, The Open Door (1885) [PGS 193-203];
Vernon Lee, A Wicked Voice (1890) [OGS 87-108];
Edith Nesbit, Man-Size in Marble (1893) [OGS 125-36];
Nick Freeman, ‘E. Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic’


Week 4: Seeing and Believing: Science and the Supernatural
Fitz-James O'Brien, What Was It? (1859) (PGS 25-37];
Amelia B. Edwards, The Phantom Coach (1864) [OGS 13-24);
The NewPass (1873) [CGS 74-85];
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain (1859) [PGS 39-66];
Srdan Smajic, ‘The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story’ (2004)


Week 5: Uncanny Sites
H. G. Wells, The Red Room (1896) [OGS 172-9];
Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House (1906) [OGS 222-35];
W. W. Jacobs, The Monkey’s Paw (1902) [PGS 231-42];
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) Nb no ‘Ralph Cram, In Kropfsberg Keep


Week 6: Ghosts and Scholars
M. R. James, 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad' (1904) [PGS 261-80];
The Mezzotint (1904);
Ralph Harrington, ‘So jarred were all my nerves: supernatural shock and traumatic terror in the ghost stories of M. R. James’;
Luke Thurston, ‘Broken Lineage: M. R. James’ from Literary Ghosts (2012)

Week 7: Ghosts of the Self
Henry James, The Jolly Corner (1908) [PGS 291-325]
Eric Savoy, ‘The Queer Subject of “The Jolly Corner”’


Week 8: Haunting Memories
May Sinclair, The Intercessor (1911);
H. D. Everett, The Next Heir (1920);
D. K. Broster, The Pestering (1932);
Richard Bleiler, ‘May Sinclair’s Supernatural Fiction’


Week 9: Modern Domestic Ghosts
A.M. Burrage, Smee (1931) [OGS 377-86];
Elizabeth Bowen, Hand in Glove (1952) [OGS 444-52];
A. S. Byatt, The July Ghost (1987)


Week 10: Imperial Spectres
W. Somerset Maugham, The Taipan (1922) [OGS 283-8];
L.P. Hartley, A Visitor from Down Under (1926) [OGS 307-21]