Dead Letters
Gender, Literary History and the Cross-correspondences
in Volume 19 (2007): Issue 1 (Mar 2007): A History of Her Own: History and the Modernist Woman Writer. Guest Editors: Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann
In the last decade, literary and cultural historians’ scrutiny of relations with those who have gone before – their own dead and those of their subjects – has taken a ghostly turn. Literary history has become haunted. As Helen Sword comments in the epilogue to her Ghostwriting Modernism, ‘hauntology’ of various kinds has become a ‘crowded bandwagon’. Among critics of literary modernism, in particular, the trope of haunting has been much used to think about the period’s relation with the past, and modernists’ own obsessions with ‘the world unseen’ are increasingly being regarded, not as rather embarrassing marginalia, but as central to their aesthetic, formal and political concerns. Modernist writing could well be defined as that which attempts selfconsciously to redefine its relation with those who have gone before, to rattle the bones of literary history until they are rearranged. The trope of haunting goes further in allowing us to see modernism as both an exorcism of the past, and an uneasy possession by the past.
