Spiritualism is often dismissed by literary critics and historians as merely a Victorian fad. Helen Sword demonstrates that it continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and seeks to explain why. Literary modernism, she maintains, is replete with ghosts and spirits. In Ghostwriting Modernism she explores spiritualism's striking persistence and what she calls "the vexed relationship between mediumistic discourse and modernist literary aesthetics."Sword begins with a brief historical review of popular spiritualism's roots in nineteenth-century literary culture. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the forms of mediumship most closely allied with writing, the forms of writing most closely allied with mediumship, and the thematic and aesthetic alliances between popular spiritualism and modernist literature. Finally, she accounts for the recent proliferation of a spiritualist-influenced vocabulary (ghostliness, hauntings, the uncanny) in the works of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and especially literary critics and theorists.Documenting the hitherto unexplored relationship between spiritualism and modern authors (some credulous, some skeptical), Sword offers compelling readings of works by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H.D., James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Even as modernists mock spiritualism's ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical excesses, she finds, they are intrigued and attracted by its ontological shiftiness, its blurring of the traditional divide between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving tendency to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message). Like modernism itself, Sword asserts, spiritualism embraces rather than eschews paradox, providing an ideological space where conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic, thought and action.
Helen Sword is a Lecturer at the University of Auckland and the author of Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D.
What People are Saying About This
Timothy Materer
Spiritualism is not merely a neglected but a repressed subject in the history of modernism. Helen Sword brilliantly illuminates an era that was credulous and mystical as well as skeptical and ironic—an age that 'materialized the spiritual and spiritualized the material.'
Bette London
Helen Sword's Ghostwriting Modernism offers a fascinating account of literary modernism's engagement with popular spiritualism. In a striking reversal of common assumptions, Sword asserts that for many writers spiritual pursuits were central rather than aberrational elements of their modernist aesthetics. In a series of provocative and engaging readings, Sword juxtaposes the work of largely unknown literary mediums with the mediumistic work of some of modernism's most canonical figures. The result is nothing less than a remapping of the domain of modernism to reveal its methods and metaphors as indelibly ghostridden.
