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.
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