Victorian hauntings: spectrality, gothic, the uncanny and literature

Victorian Hauntings asks its reader to consider the following questions: What does it mean to read or write with ghosts, or to suggest that acts of reading or writing are haunted ? In what ways can authors in the nineteenth century be read so as to acknowledge the various phantom effects which return within their texts ? In what ways do the traces of such " ghost writing " surface in the works of Dickens,Tennyson,Eliot and Hardy ? How does the work of spectrality, revenance and the uncanny transform materially both the forms of the literary in the Victorian era and our reception of it today? Beginning with an expoloration of matters of haunting,the uncanny,the gothic and the spectral, Julian Wolfreys traces the ghostly resonances at work in Victorian writing and how such persistence addresses isues of memory and responsibility which haunt the work of reading.