1st Edition

Excavating Modernity Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900-1930

Edited By Eleanor Dobson, Gemma Banks Copyright 2019
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    192 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.