Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Fiction, edited by Markus Altena Davidsen.

Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Fiction, edited by Markus Altena Davidsen. 2018, Routledge. Hb. £125.00/$155.00, ISBN 13: 9781138559660.

Margree, Victoria (2019): British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930. Our Own Ghostliness, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-030-27141-1

Margree, Victoria (2019): British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930. Our Own Ghostliness, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-030-27141-1

Realism and the Supernatural in Ghost Stories of the Fin de Siècle

This article examines the uses of realism in fin-de-siècle ghost stories by Vernon Lee, Ella D’Arcy, Rudyard Kipling, and Gertrude Atherton, It argues that forms of realist practice were central to the sophistication of these stories, and draws connections between their use in supernatural fiction and the work of modernists such as Joseph Conrad. Examining works from the late 1880s to 1905, it maintains that the dismissal of realism by modernists such as Woolf underestimated its importance and its versatility, and that the ghost story’s importance as a vehicle for literary experiment is insufficiently acknowledged.

The Book as Fearful Thing

Some books seem to have the power to possess their readers. This chapter traces the figure of this fearfully empowered book in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts, when such books challenged more familiar celebrations of literacy and of the press’s power to disseminate enlightenment. Using a concept of “magic materiality,” taking our cue from legends conflating the printer Johann Faust with the sorcerer Dr Faustus, we explore the association, in Scottish gothic novels especially, of printed books with fearsome potency and political danger. In Walter Scott’s The Monastery, we show, a “black book” with an eerie life of its own represents both a Protestant Bible and a book of spells. Finally, we consider a historical episode shaped by this literary phenomenon, demonstrating how over the course of the 1793 sedition trials in Edinburgh, copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man came to resemble the magic books of the era’s supernatural fiction.

‘The master-key that opens every door’: Hieroglyphs, Translations and Palimpsests

This chapter considers the translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs along with advancements in printing technologies across the nineteenth century, which led to an increased hieroglyphic presence in modern media. It focuses, in particular, in the use of hieroglyphs by authors of fiction, including H. Rider Haggard and E. Nesbit. In some cases, Egyptologists lent their expertise; alternatively, authors and designers consulted these experts’ grammars and dictionaries to construct their own (sometimes erroneous) meanings. Analysing the use of hieroglyphs in a variety of fiction and other cultural forms not only reveals networks of consultation between those with a professional and an amateur interest in ancient Egypt, but the wealth of connotations that the hieroglyphs suggested: from a magical language (often in children’s or supernatural fiction) to a romantic script suitable for love letters and secret correspondence (suited to romance, mystery, and detective genres). Meanwhile, increased tourism in Egypt resulted in the proliferation of palimpsestic chiselling of names onto temples and pyramids, while ankhs obelisks were incorporated into European and American grave designs. Ultimately, these uses of hieroglyphs reveal a bid for immortality, whether that of the individual or even the literary works that contemporary authors were inscribing with ancient Egyptian script.

The Formularization of the East Simulacrum in the Poetic Consonance of Walter De La Mare

The desideratum of this paper is to pageant of the formularization of the East simulacrum in the poetic consonance of Walter De La Mare, De La Mare always been known as a writer of fantasy, imagination world and supernatural fiction in English literature, it is proposed here that he is, in fact concerned with exploration of the conscious and unconscious selves. His inspection is more philosophical than psychological in that he makes no use of Freud formulas. He follows rather the intuitive path of Jung but uses the media of fiction; Display and formulation the simulacrum theme in two sonnets of De La Mare ''Arabia & Listener '' characterize the imagination world of the East. East fantasy for De La Mare is pure and marvelous creation which seemed he merged the fantasy cosmos of the East, even supposing Walter De La Mare wants to involving and remain in the nature of the East not in the West creation by virtue of him in distinction to the West, according to his verses of Walter De La Mare ''Arabia &Listeners '' there is no ambiguity that nature in the East more applicable for live than nature in the West.