Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place.

Introduction.- The Chapter Before the First: Dwelling and the Uncanny.- English Losses: Thomas Hardy and the Memory of Wessex.- All You Need is Love? Edward Thomas, Apostrophizing the Other.- ‘A parallel dimension’: The Haunted Streets and Spectral Poethics of the Neo-Victorian Novel.- ‘Can you tell me where my country lies?’: Re-membering, Re-presenting the Forgotten.- ‘Chewing through your Wimpey dreams’: Whimsy, Loss, and the ‘experience’ of the Rural in English Music and Art, 1966-1976.- ‘And for a moment’: Voicing the Landscape with Alice Oswald and John Burnside.- ‘It was suddenly hard winter’: Crossing the Field with John Burnside.- Place and Displacement: Julian Barnes and the Haunted Self.

Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach grounded in close reading, the text places Jacques Derrida’s work on spectrality in dialogue with particular aspects of phenomenology. The volume explores writing and culture from the 1880s to the present day, proceeding through four sections examining related questions of identity, memory, the landscape, and our modern relationship to the past. Julian Wolfreys presents a theoretically informed understanding of the efficacy of literature and culture in connecting us to the past in an affective and engaged manner.

“A book to make you revisit your own intimate, embodied experience of reading and remembering. Wolfreys’ take on collective memory is an enamoured song in which we heed the music of place, fantasmatic and embodied, spectral and urgent, residual and of the future. There is, for Wolfreys, no interpretation outside experience and Haunted Selves complexifies his apperception of the unique event literature opens us to: an indwelling and experience that opens us to loss and to being, to being as loss. A meditation on the music of the land and a reflexion of the spectrality of the reading experience, Haunted Selves reveals collective memory to be an experience that is ethical and embodied, political and aesthetic, political because it is intractably literary. To those pondering the future of theory and criticism, this is a must-read for any reader convinced of the transforming power of literature.” (Catherine Bernard, Professor of English Literature and Art History, Paris Diderot University, France)

“This is a fascinating, bold, and yet accessible book about varieties of functions that the motif/the convention/the experience of haunting and being haunted has had in late nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century English-language texts. It ably integrates theoretical exposition and analysis (Derrida, Heidegger) with precisely focused readings of texts and cultural products. You end up seeing ghosts where you never thought they were, and understanding better the ones you thought you knew. Understanding the past, reading itself, looking at the land, memory – these all partake of the ghostly encounter. The range of texts and writers considered is surprising and one of the study’s great strengths. Its focus on technique and the connection of technique and haunting is gratifying. It has a sense of humour too. A fine, focused book that opens up other worlds of reading.” (Professor David Malcolm, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Gdańsk, Poland)

“Haunted Selves is markedly distinguished and distinctive book. It adds itself to the long series of admirable books that Julian Wolfreys has published over the years. Haunted Selves centers on readings of work by Thomas Hardy and those writers who come after Hardy in the twentieth century, especially the so-called ‘neo-Victorians’ and their contemporaries, from Edward Thomas, Sarah Waters, Peter Ackroyd, Peter Carey, and Charles Palliser, all the way down to Alice Oswald, John Burnside, and Julian Barnes. The chapter on Hardy’s poetry, for example, is surely one of the best essays ever written on that topic. Nevertheless, an even stronger and more original aspect of Haunted Selves is the brilliant prolonged meditation on a complex tangle of inter-related theoretical issues. This meditation is carried on from chapter to chapter. It is inspired by many recent theorists (Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, and others). The issues investigated include haunting, ghosts, spectrality, the uncanny, self and place, self in place, scene, rural experience, memory, re-presentation, the trace, Being, and so on. Julian Wolfreys’ ‘take’ on these topics in their mutual inherence is powerful and impressively original.” (J. Hillis Miller, UCI Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, University of California at Irvine, USA)

“This is a beautifully written, captivating, and thought provoking book. Through literature, poetry and philosophy it takes us on a profound journey from the 1880s to the present day to reveal the ways in which our memories and identities are shaped by the landscapes, places and spaces of the past, and how our everyday lives are haunted by the unfamiliar.” (Professor Nicole Anderson, Macquarie University, Australia and Editor-in-Chief of Derrida Today Journal)

Applies Derrida’s work on spectrality to a wide range of interdisciplinary texts Examines the interconnection of subject and place through the lens of phenomenological philosophy Links memory studies to Gothic, Victorian, and Neo-Victorian literature

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