Narrating the Ghost: Readings in the Gothic and M.R. James
Narrating the Ghost: Readings in the Gothic and M.R. James

Author(s): Jacek Mydla
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: ghost story; literary Gothic; narrative; the fantastic; suspense
Summary/Abstract: Jacek Mydla’s main goal in Narrating the Ghost: Readings in the Gothic and M. R. James is to explore selected “Gothic” narratives and Montague Rhodes James’s (1862–1936) ghost stories by means of the tools of narrative theory. Using these tools, Mydla identifies and describes the narrative technique of the classic ghost story, a literary genre of which, in popular recognition, M. R. James is one of the most prominent representatives. A guiding category is that of distance, which binds the analyses together and justifies the division of the book into two parts. In Part I, the author focuses on the ideological meaning of distance, which animated the rise and future development of the literary Gothic in England of the “Enlightenment” (second half of the seventeenth century) and the Victorian period (second half of the nineteenth century) England. In Part II, the author examines M. R. James’s use of a wide range of distancing devices whose main purpose was to transform readers into ghost-seers, a category in common use in contemporary subject literature. Mydla’s goal is to create a platform for the encounter between narrative theory and the ghost story. He shows that such encounter and dialogue can be productive, and in this way fills the gap in research caused by the fact that narrative theory, for a considerable period of its development, focused on realistic fiction. The motivation behind the analyses undertaken in this study is the desire to estimate the extent to which narrative theory can be applied productively to genres such as the mystery story, terror fiction and weird fiction and, more generally, the literary Gothic. M. R. James successfully made ghostly storytelling the chosen province of his activity as fiction author (which occupied him for more than twenty years), which may be an indication that ghost stories are a genre using their own narrative rhetoric.

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