A Strange Night in a Strange House: The Country House as Queer Space in Interwar Mystery Fiction (original) (raw)
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Housing the past: Victorian houses in neo - Victorian fiction
Crossroads A Journal of English Studies
As argued, among others, by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958), a house which has been inhabited over a period of time becomes a composite of its physical structure and the mental space created by its residents’ thoughts, dreams and memories. This article analyses two contemporary novels in which houses as tangible manifestations of temporally remote experience provide a link to the Vic-torian past. Lauren Willig’s That Summer (2014) and Kate Beaufoy’s Another Heartbeat in the House (2015) represent the same type of neo-Victorian fiction: their plots are composed of two strands, one set in the modern age and the other in the nineteenth century, and in the course of each story parallels and conver-gences are revealed between the two ages and the two casts of characters. The article argues that both novels are also typical “romances of the archive” – as defined by Suzanne Keen (2001) − in which the ma-terial legacy of the past triggers a personally motivated inquiry, lead...
Textual Practice, no. 1, 2000.Reprinted in Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, volume III, ed. Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, London: Routledge, 2004., 2004
The essay argues takes up Terry Castle’s suggestion in The Apparitional Lesbian that same sex relations and intensities were represented in spectral form through narratives of the ghostly in cultural moments prior to the formulation and circulation of official sexological discourses on ‘homosexuality’ in the late 19th century. This ‘homospectrality’ is mapped through the historical shifts in meaning around the uncanny (Freud) and as the forms of public male intimacy specified in ‘the early modern closet’ (Stewart) are transformed into the haunted solitude of the Gothic closet. Henry James’s late ghost stories, all written after the trials of Oscar Wilde and in the new post-trial regime of the homosexual closet that resulted from the emergence of a queer stereotype (Sinfield), and that depict the confrontation with spectral figures in closed rooms and closeted spaces at the tops and backs of houses, are read as explorations of the homerotic space of the closet. In particular The Jolly Corner (1908) is read in relation to James’s autobiographical account of his induction into the world of European high art and of a nightmare in that setting that parallels the novella (A Small Boy and Others).
Revisiting the “Inhabited Space” of English Country House in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
The English Country House happens to be one of the most iconic topoi in English literary studies. Since narratologists have long privileged time over space, narrative space remained a relatively unexplored territory until the twentieth century, which intensified the interest in the house as the thematic fulcrum of literary works. British novelist Sarah Waters’s first venture into the realm of the sub-genre of English Country House fiction, The Little Stranger (2009) is a befitting discourse that appropriates the poetics of manorial space. Hundreds Hall, the Warwickshire seat of the Ayreses, encapsulates many roles as the epicentre of the story and as a powerful symbol of the gradual decay of English aristocracy in the post-World War II Britain. The article will try to incorporate Gaston Bachelard’s spatial criticism elaborated in his The Poetics of Space (1958) and the concept of heterotopia by Foucault for the interpretation/ (s) of the narrative. The study seeks to locate Bachelar...
Textual Practice The haunted closet: Henry James's queer spectrality
The essay argues takes up Terry Castle’s suggestion in The Apparitional Lesbian that same sex relations and intensities were represented in spectral form through narratives of the ghostly in cultural moments prior to the formulation and circulation of official sexological discourses on ‘homosexuality’ in the late 19th century. This ‘homospectrality’ is mapped through the historical shifts in meaning around the uncanny (Freud) and as the forms of public male intimacy specified in ‘the early modern closet’ (Stewart) are transformed into the haunted solitude of the Gothic closet. Henry James’s late ghost stories, all written after the trials of Oscar Wilde and in the new post-trial regime of the homosexual closet that resulted from the emergence of a queer stereotype (Sinfield), and that depict the confrontation with spectral figures in closed rooms and closeted spaces at the tops and backs of houses, are read as explorations of the homerotic space of the closet. In particular The Jolly Corner (1908) is read in relation to James’s autobiographical account of his induction into the world of European high art and of a nightmare in that setting that parallels the novella (A Small Boy and Others).