Overview

This book examines how the representation of the ghost-soldier in literature published between19141934, both marks the presence of trauma and attempts to make sense of it. Andrew Smith examines short stories, novels, poems and memoirs that employ ghosts to reflect upon feelings of loss, paralleling the literary context with accounts of shell-shock which construe the damaged soldier as psychologically missing and therefore spectre-like. The author argues that literary and non-literary texts repeatedly deploy a form of the uncanny, familiar from a Gothic tradition, as a way of reflecting upon grief. In support of this claim, he draws on fiction by well-known authors such as M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Dennis Wheatley, alongside largely forgotten contributions to The Strand and other periodical publications such as The Occult Review.

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9781474443432

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Reviews

In the course of this finely argued book, Andrew Smith offers an important historicist revision of Freud on trauma and the uncanny before moving on to explore a hugely impressive range of ghost-texts written during the First World War and later. The criticism is acute and sensitive, the historical context vividly drawn. --David Punter, University of Bristol

Author Information

Andrew Smith, Reader, University of Sheffield.

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