Search Results

This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.

This chapter takes a look at the ghost stories of M.R. James. It studies the way the seemingly conservative Victorian and Edwardian world of James's tales hides a critique of an apparently amoral modernism. It notes that some of his tales put certain demands on readers, and reveals that James suggests that the donnish world is truly Gothic due to its consideration of the unfolding pictorial Gothic narrative. This chapter also discusses how the modernist literary culture of the 1920s can be re-read through a discourse of spectrality.

This chapter examines the history of the study of medieval art in Great Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. Before 1932, no British university offered an honours degree course in the history of art. In the case of the British Academy, art did not figure in any of its sections until 1923 when the title of Section Two was changed to Medieval and Modern History and Archaeology and Art. Three fellows of this section include M.R. James, G.F. Warner and O.M. Dalton. This chapter also highlights the contributions of continental art historians to the development of British medieval studies. They include Hugo Buchtal, Otto Demus and Ernst Kitzinger.

The nostalgia for the Catholic past comes full circle in Chapter 14 in an assessment of clerical ghost stories with their interest in ecclesiastical architecture, fittings, and texts. In M. R. James, antiquarian protagonists show little respect for holy objects and thus invoke demonic invasion. James is concerned with the effect of a world which refuses to admit the spiritual power of objects, and thus has no ways of mediating their causal power. His tales question this boundary between subject and object. J. Meade Falkner shares this desire to restore the sacramental and psychic efficacy of objects by showing their negative power in The Lost Stradivarius and positively in the novel of Gothic usurpation, The Nebuly Coat, in which Cullerne Minster is a living thing and agent of Providential judgement through the ‘speaking’ arches of its moving tower, and by the bells, which mediate past and present and enact providential judgement.

Mary Butts is an outlier among the writers discussed in this book because of her deep-felt religiosity and equally deep-felt scepticism towards modern expressions of unbelief. Yet, of all these figures, she was the most knowledgeable in the contemporary literature of unbelief and the only writer to mention ‘rationalist press stuff’ explicitly in a work of fiction.^⁠ This chapter argues that Butts made her own contribution to this literature in the form of Traps for Unbelievers (1932), a study of the error made by modern unbelievers when they insist on ‘truth’ as the minimum requirement for belief. It then moves on to Butts’s own ‘strong’ understanding of belief in belief and examines the working out of this concept in novels and short supernatural stories from the late 1920s and 1930s. Butts suggests that a weakening in the human belief system left by the failure of Christianity needed to be compensated for by a strengthening elsewhere. This chapter argues she used her fiction as a testing ground for possible sources of new conviction and for the nature and degree of belief that could be borne by modern fiction and, by extension, the modern world at large.