Synopses & Reviews
Nominated for the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for the best book published on the Gothic 2009/2010, awarded by the International Gothic Association! This book examines writing in the Gothic mode which subverts the dominant national narrative of the British home front. Instead of seeing wartime experience as a site of fellowship and emotional resilience, Elizabeth Bowen, Anna Kavan, Mervyn Peake, Roy Fuller and others depict shadowy figures on the margin of the nation.
About the Author
SARA WASSON is a lecturer in Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University, UK. She received her doctorate from Cornell University, New York. She has published research on cities in literature, sensory geography, and late twentieth-century science fiction and horror.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Urban Gothic of the British Home Front
Nightmare city: Gothic Flnerie and Wartime Spectacle in Henry Green and Roy Fuller
Carceral City, Cryptic Signs: Wartime Fiction by Anna Kavan and Graham Greene
Gothic, Mechanized Ghosts: the Wartime City and Industry in Inez Holden, Anne Ridler and Diana Murray Hill
Uncanny Houses on the Home Front: Elizabeth Bowen
The Rubbish Pile and the Grave: Nation and the Abject in John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Mervyn Peake
Afterword: The Politics of Lamentation
Bibliography
Index