Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
