1st Edition
Excavating Modernity Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900-1930
This book scrutinizes physical, temporal and psychological strata across early twentieth-century literature, focusing on geological and archaeological tropes and conceptions of the stratified psyche. The essays explore psychological perceptions, from practices of envisioning that mimic looking at a painting, photograph or projected light, to the comprehension of the palimpsestic complexities of language, memory and time. This collection is the first to see early twentieth-century physical, temporal and psychological strata interact across a range of canonical and popular authors, working in a variety of genres, from theatre to ghost stories, children’s literature to modernist magna opera.
Introduction Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks 1. Excavating the Psyche as Constructed by Pre-Freudian Pioneers George M. Johnson 2. "As a Burnt Circle": Thomas Hardy’s Visible Voices Holly Corfield Carr 3. The Dead City: Eleonora Duse and the Archaeology of the Soul Maria Pia Pagani 4. Excavating Children: Archaeological Imagination and Time Slip in the Early 1900s Virginia Zimmerman 5. The Sphinx at the Séance: Literature, Spiritualism and Psycho-Archaeology Eleanor Dobson 6. The "Carefully-Constructed Screen": Phantasmagorical Strata in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James Craig Wallace 7. Vernon Lee: Excavating The Spirit of Rome Sally Blackburn 8. Mind Strata: Layers of Consciousness in James Joyce’s Ulysses Annalisa Federici 9. Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Xavier Le Brun
Biography
Eleanor Dobson is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham.
Gemma Banks is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham.