Diana Wallace - Böcker

Female Gothic Histories traces the development of women's Gothic historical fiction from Sophia Lee's The Recess in the late eighteenth century through the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt to the bestselling novels of Sarah Waters in the twenty-first century. Often left out of traditional historical narratives, women writers have turned to Gothic historical fiction as a mode of writing which can both reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. This study breaks new ground in bringing together thinking about the Gothic and the historical novel, and in combining psychoanalytic theory with historical contextualisation.

This is the first full-length study of the poet, novelist and translator Christopher Meredith, best-known for his novel Shifts (1988), the classic account of post-industrialisation in Wales. It draws on new material from interviews with Meredith to locate his writing in the context of his native south-east Wales. This locale, with its distinctive combination of rural and industrial and its fractured history, informs a concern with place, language and identity that runs through Meredith's work. Using chapters which pair his poetry and fiction in order to listen to the echoes between them, this study traces the development of his writing and illuminates the shared themes and concerns that connect his texts. Positioning his work in relation to wider critical discourses on the industrial novel and historical fiction, the book argues for Meredith's international significance as a major writer concerned with place and national identity.

A gripping Gothic tale of possession, madness and murder, Hilda Vaughan's Harvest Home (1936), is set in Abercoran on the south-west coast of Wales in the time of George III. Daniel Hafod rides home from England one fine morning to become Master of Great House after the death of his uncle. But his obsessive pride and his dark desire for the pretty dairy-maid Eiluned lead to his downfall, as he and his sailor cousin, Dan, compete for her love. A lyrical evocation of Welsh rural life, Harvest Home is also a tautly-written psychological study of a man driven mad by desire which draws on the history of wreckers then active on the Welsh sea-coast, the legend of Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogi, and superstitions associated with Nos Calangaeaf (All Hallows Eve) when spirit voices call out the names of those soon to die.

Modernism and Historical Fiction: Writing the Past is the first comprehensive study of modernist historical fiction. Analysing texts from all four nations of the British Isles and arguing for a new spatially-aware theoretical approach, it outlines a concept of modernist historical fiction which bridges the gap between Walter Scott’s novels and late-twentieth-century postmodern historiographic metafiction. Beginning with an exploration of Virginia Woolf’s engagement with Scott’s novels, it argues that this informed her own writing of historical fiction, including Orlando and Flush. It then uses five case studies examining representations of key historical periods (the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) to analyse how other modernist writers used a variety of narrative and linguistic strategies to expose the plurality of the past. The rich and diverse body of historical fictions examined includes work by Ford Madox Ford, H.D., Laura Riding, Mary Butts, Helen Waddell, John Cowper Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edith Sitwell, Naomi Mitchison, Lynette Roberts, Gwyn Thomas and Joseph Conrad.  These fictions foreground the act of writing the past in order to revise, displace or supplement traditional narratives and offer new ways of thinking about the processes of historiography.