| Description |
1 online resource (xii, 209 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Introduction : the urban Gothic of the British home front. London's urban Gothic ; Fractured narrative, fractured nation -- Nightmare city : Gothic Flânerie and wartime spectacle in Henry Green and Roy Fuller. The fl̂aneur's use of the city ; Gothic flânerie : psychological disintegration ; "Bright, dead Dolls" : flânerie and wartime London ; Henry Green, Caught ; Perilous light ; London's imperial legacies ; Hallucinations of women in urban space ; Monstrous city -- Carceral city, cryptic signs : wartime fiction by Anna Kavan and Graham Greene. Barbed wire and locked doors : internments camps and asylums ; Anna Kavan ; Graham Greene's The ministry of fear (1943) -- Gothic, mechanised ghosts : wartime industry in Inez Holden, Anne Ridler and Diana Murray Hill. Women's wartime work ; "A hideous yellow gloom" ; Deadly spaces and disintegrating narrative -- Elizabeth Bowen's uncanny houses. Homes and nation ; Constructing the home front ; Nation and the domestic uncanny ; "Strange growths" : uncanny life in Bowen's interiors ; "Dark ate the outlines of the house" : Bowen's national position ; "The infected zone" : time and the uncanny ; Female cruelty in the domestic interior ; "The rubbish pile and the grave" : nation and the abject in John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Mervyn Peake. National narratives of the dead ; City of the dead ; "Murdered bodies" : anthropomorphic ruins in neo-Romantic art criticism ; Mervyn Peake's wartime writing -- Afterword : the politics of lamentation. Resistant mourning ; "Crying with phantom tongue" : poetry that resists consolation |
| Summary |
This book examines 'home front' literature of the Second World War, arguing that Gothic tropes and forms mark moments of fracture in the national mythologies of wartime home, city and fellowship. These works in the Gothic mode subvert mythologies of nation that are still influential today. Anna Kavan, Mervyn Peake, Elizabeth Bowen, Roy Fuller, Henry Green and others present counter-stories to the dominant national mythology of British survival and emotional resilience. In the texts of this monograph, the city grows strange, time distorts, and hallucinatory narrative voices depict a nightmare realm. Doubling, temporal dislocation, narrative disjunction and tropes of haunting gather around shadowy figures on the margin of the nation. This book moves from city streets, to hospitals and prisons, to factories, to homes and finally to morgues. Each location presents a London that is, in the words of Mervyn Peake, "half masonry, half pain." |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 172-195) and index |
| Notes |
English |
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Print version record |
| Subject |
Piper, John, 1903-1992
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Sutherland, Graham Vivian, 1903-1980.
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Peake, Mervyn, 1911-1968.
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| SUBJECT |
Peake, Mervyn, 1911-1968 fast |
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Piper, John, 1903-1992 fast |
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Sutherland, Graham Vivian, 1903-1980 fast |
| Subject |
Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English -- History and criticism
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English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
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World War, 1939-1945 -- Literature and the war.
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Literary studies: from c 1900 -- English.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
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Literature.
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English fiction
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Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English
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War and literature
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Literature.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780230274891 |
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0230274897 |
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