Ghostwriting modernism /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Sword, Helen.
Imprint:	Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2002.
Description:	1 online resource (xiii, 212 pages)
Language:	English
Series:	Cornell paperbacks Cornell paperbacks.
Subject:	English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism. Spiritualism in literature. American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism. Spiritualism -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 20th century. Postmodernism (Literature) -- English-speaking countries. Modernism (Literature) -- English-speaking countries. Occultism in literature. Ghosts in literature. Death in literature. American literature. Death in literature. English literature. Ghosts in literature. Modernism (Literature) Occultism in literature. Postmodernism (Literature) Spiritualism. Spiritualism in literature. English-speaking countries. Criticism, interpretation, etc. History.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11678142

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9781501717666 1501717669 0801436990 9780801436994 0801487757 9780801487750
Digital file characteristics:	data file
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-203) and index. Print version record.
Summary:	Spiritualism is often dismissed by literary critics and historians as merely a Victorian fad. Helen Sword demonstrates that it continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and seeks to explain why. Literary modernism, she maintains, is replete with ghosts and spirits. In Ghostwriting Modernism she explores spiritualism's striking persistence and what she calls "the vexed relationship between mediumistic discourse and modernist literary aesthetics."Sword begins with a brief historical review of popular spiritualism's roots in nineteenth-century literary culture. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the forms of mediumship most closely allied with writing, the forms of writing most closely allied with mediumship, and the thematic and aesthetic alliances between popular spiritualism and modernist literature. Finally, she accounts for the recent proliferation of a spiritualist-influenced vocabulary (ghostliness, hauntings, the uncanny) in the works of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and especially literary critics and theorists. Documenting the hitherto unexplored relationship between spiritualism and modern authors (some credulous, some skeptical), Sword offers compelling readings of works by James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, H.D., James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Even as modernists mock spiritualism's ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical excesses, she finds, they are intrigued and attracted by its ontological shiftiness, its blurring of the traditional divide between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving tendency to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message). Like modernism itself, Sword asserts, spiritualism embraces rather than eschews paradox, providing an ideological space where conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic, thought and action
Other form:	Print version: Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting modernism. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2002 0801436990

Review by Choice Review

Sword (Indiana Univ.) builds on Leon Surette's The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (CH, Sep'93) and, particularly, the work of Timothy Materer, whose Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (CH, Sep'96) dealt with some of the same authors (Yeats, Eliot, H.D. Plath, Hughes, and Merrill) treated in the present volume. More narrowly focused than Materer, Sword confines her examination to the place of spiritualism and spirit writing in 20th-century modernist writing. She does, however, go beyond Materer to consider prose writers (Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, and Woolf). Arguing that "spiritualist tropes play a vital role in the thematic and aesthetic innovations of a wide range of modernist writers, the skeptical as well as the credulous," Sword offers a convincing demonstration of the ubiquitous influence of spiritualist practice. Of particular interest is the chapter on "spirit writing"--that is, books written by mediums who claim to be channeling the words of the deceased. This practice raises numerous questions about authorship, authority, allusion, and intertextuality, and Sword provides a useful discussion of these issues. Although the book betrays some of its origins in a dissertation, its extensive bibliography, copious notes, and fine insights make it a recommended volume for academic readers at all levels. B. Diemert Brescia University College

Review by Choice Review

Ghostwriting modernism /

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