Academic literature on the topic 'Haunted houses – England – Fiction'

Boyne, John. This house is haunted. Doubleday, 2013.

Clary, Julian. Briefs encountered. Ebury Press, 2012.

Fleming, Leah. Winter's children. Avon, 2010.

Beaton, M. C. Agatha Raisin and the haunted house. St Martin's Press, 2005.

Beaton, M. C. Agatha Raisin and the haunted house. St. Martin's Minotaur, 2003.

ill, Fisher Eric Scott, and Hawthorne Nathaniel 1804-1864, eds. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The house of the seven gables. Magic Wagon, 2010.

Deveraux, Jude. Someone to love. Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Smith, Michael Marshall. The Servants. HarperCollins, 2008.

Plass, Adrian. Silver birches: A novel. Zondervan, 2009.

Prince, Maggie. The house on Hound Hill. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Robert, Mighall. "Haunted Houses I and II." In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262182.003.0003.

Edmundson, Melissa. "Irish Women Writers and the Supernatural." In Irish Gothic. Edinburgh University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399500555.003.0012.

Berman, Carolyn Vellenga. "Introduction." In Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0001.

Weihl, Harrington. "Bowen, Elizabeth (1899–1973)." In Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Routledge, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781135000356-rem2090-1.

"PN: It reminds me that in the story called ‘Madame Realism’, the narrator decides that ‘Anything can be a transitional object. No one spoke of limits, they spoke of boundaries. And my boundaries shift, she thought, like ones do after a war when countries lose or gain depending on having won or lost’ (MR, 39). The reference to Winnicott’s concept of ‘transitional objects’ seems to have a relevance to your sense of how fiction operates—perhaps as (to use another concept from Winnicott) a ‘potential space’ somewhere between psyche and world where a certain ‘play’ can take place? LT: In criticism you always have to make one argument, and you have to support that argument against other arguments. In writing a novel or a short story there are arguments going on too, but there you have the possibility of different voices and different characters. You don’t have to argue as if there’s one truth, or one way to see something, you can allow for a lot of ambivalence. In some way writing fiction for me is about anxiety and being extremely insecure, and having between me—and maybe this is Winnicottian—between me and the world a space where I say, this is not me, and it is me, ambivalently, but this is also not Truth. PN: Motion Sickness suggests that national identity is like armour; in Haunted Houses are we meant to conclude that gender is similarly a kind of defence and constraint? LT: Yes, I think I very much felt that when I wrote Haunted Houses. All my books are in a way about limits, and about fighting those limits. Haunted Houses definitely was about the limits of gender and of being a girl, how you took it on, how you wrestled with it; then with Motion Sickness it was national identity and nationalism. But you never want to celebrate your limits, you don’t want to celebrate being an American, to celebrate being a woman. That’s making a virtue out of something that’s neither a vice nor a virtue. It’s a given. You’re born into something and it’s a matter of what you do with that. PN: Relations between self and other seem to be played out visually a lot of the time—in Haunted Houses, for example: ‘there was a chance of being looked at, which was better than being spoken to: it was as if she were being taken, unaware and involuntarily, and not taken’ (H, 62). LT: Being looked at—again this would be an interesting argument that pornography is not rape—looking at something and having a fantasy is different from being thrown into the bushes and raped. This could also lead into a discussion about aspects of female desire and whether a woman’s desire to be looked at is passive or active. I tend to feel those terms, ‘passive’ and ‘active’, are—well,." In Textual Practice. Routledge, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203986219-22.

"That’s what more or less has happened to me.’ Has it happened to you? LT: How do you deal with love? Is it a limit, or is it something that’s so explosive it’s not a limit? This thing we feel to be unique when we experience it is so common. Warhol did have love affairs. He did in the last years of his life live with somebody, I believe. I think the kinds of questions you set for yourself around what you’re feeling can stop you from just being able to throw yourself into it. Also, there’s the problem of emotional repetitiveness. PN: There’s a related interest here in breaking with conventional forms of narrative. In one of your later stories, Madame Realism writes in her notebook: ‘Beware of premature closure’ (MR, 147), and this distrust of narratives which are driven by a need for endings is already there in Haunted Houses. LT: Yes, that’s right. PN: And a lot of this depends on how you think about memory. Haunted Houses offers at least two different views: Jane, for example, thinks that ‘there was just as much invention in versions of the past as in what’s written about the future’ (H, 100), while Jimmy wonders whether ‘remembering things keeps you from thinking new thoughts’ (H, 103). LT: I don’t think you have a choice between these two. Memory is in fact very active. A sociologist who read Motion Sickness in manuscript said he was disgusted by it because the narrator was so passive. And I said what do you mean ‘passive’? She thinks all the time. PN: ‘Grace thought her time in bars would lead to something but Lisa said she shouldn’t expect anything to lead to anything’ (H, 146). In Motion Sickness you describe a fight as ‘much less conclusive’ than a prizefight or a baseball game—‘It’s much more like fiction’ (M, 21). How does this inconclusiveness relate to the narrative desire to connect one thing with another? LT: They’re in bed together. You wouldn’t have that desire to connect one thing with another unless there was all this inconclusiveness. Again, it’s the absence of an ability to make a conclusion that draws you to want to make connections. PN: That recalls Gertrude Stein’s comment about any assemblage of heterogeneous things already containing implicit narrative links. LT: I’m sure she was influenced by the Kuleshov experiment in film, that when you edit, you can put images together and no matter what, the viewer makes connections. Take what Tarantino does with narrative in Pulp Fiction. I began to think of it as a kind of time-line being stretched, and the end, what kind of end is that?" In Textual Practice. Routledge, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203986219-24.

"talk about permeable! There’s a way, oddly enough, that you can be very active in being looked at. Being extremely aware of that. It’s not a position of powerlessness. Women like to look too. PN: The gaze, of flirtation or voyeurism, seems bound up with another major theme of this novel, which is the artificiality of gender. Early on, Grace is warned against promiscuity by her brother: ‘“You did it when you were my age,” she said. “I’m a guy,” he said, “it’s different.” “Fuck difference,” she said’ (H, 37). The novel as a whole seems to ‘fuck difference’ in its play with forms of androgyny, transvestism, and so on. Would that be the right place to put the emphasis? LT: In the sense of a binary division. It’s a very hard thing to discuss. I’m such an anti-essentialist that while I recognize that there is difference, what that means will always be unknown for me. Why hierarchies come into being, how those kinds of differences are arrived at. And while you don’t know, there’s the area you can play. The space in which our ignorance of why things come to be the way they are can also give us the room and energy to fuck around, not to accept things for what they are. PN: The characters are haunted by the seemingly absolute forms of sexual difference then? And the novel seems to gesture toward an opposite idea of gender as fiction. Your references in the novel to Susan Sontag’s essay on Camp reminded me that she had proposed some of these ideas well before Judith Butler and others. Sontag says, for example, that ‘the most refined form of sexual attractiveness…consists in going against the grain of one’s sex’; and she defines Camp as ‘the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of “man” and “woman”, “person” and “thing”).’ How important were these ideas to Haunted Houses? LT: Haunted by difference, yes, and also by the possibility of agency. ‘Camp’ was a revelatory essay for me. Unfortunately Sontag pulled back from those concerns. You would have felt from that essay that in the seventies she could have been a very sophisticated feminist. But she wasn’t, and in fact I think she’s something of an anti-feminist. Those kinds of ideas were important. The first gay male friend I had was when I was eighteen. I thought of feminism and gay liberation as working the same terrain. To me at that point it was all about not accepting what you were being handed on the sexual platter—what roles. PN: There’s a passage from Andy Warhol which you quote in one of your new pieces called ‘Love Sentence’: ‘Once you see emotions from a certain angle, you can never think of them as real again." In Textual Practice. Routledge, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203986219-23.