In his introduction to the original collection, Leon Edel discusses the “decadent nineties” and the possible reasons behind the apogee of James’s ghost-story writing in this period (see James, 1948, p. After analyzing the narrative frames of several stories as architectural passages between fiction and reality, this chapter concludes by associating James’s construct of the “house of fiction” with the haunted house in his stories, conceptualized as the ultimate stage where ghost texts act out their “emptiness and incompletion.” It then argues that in James’s ghost stories the true ghost is always a metaliterary “ghost text” represented consistently as a lost original, an illegible or destroyed manuscript. Interrogating the “psychological ghost story” genre, this chapter suggests that the Jamesian ghostly resorts to structures of repetition enacted in the stories, mainly in the idea of heredity and family curses, and in the transmission of texts across time, equating texts with testaments. This chapter begins with a reflection on how the largely overlooked publishing history of James’s supernatural short stories may offer an alternative account of the plot twists, tropes, and motifs of the form that we have long taken as given.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |