Cornell University Press
Ghostwriting Modernism: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids
Key Metrics
- Helen Sword
- Cornell University Press
- Paperback
- 9780801487750
- 9.1 X 5.96 X 0.57 inches
- 0.69 pounds
- Literary Criticism > English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
Helen Sword is a poet, scholar, master teacher, and international expert on academic, professional, and creative writing across the disciplines. Her books, articles, and online tools have empowered writers around the world to write more clearly, confidently, prolifically, and with greater pleasure.
Born and raised in Southern California, Helen received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited.
She is the author of books including Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012), The Writer’s Diet (Chicago UP, 2016), and Air & Light & Time and Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017) and the creator of popular digital resources such as the Writer’s Diet, an online diagnostic test that is now also available as a free add-in for MS Word; the Writing BASE, an interactive productivity tool; Helen’s Word, a YouTube channel that encourages writers at all levels to “show up and write”; and Zombie Nouns, a TedEd video that has received nearly a million views on YouTube.
Helen’s current book project, Writing with Pleasure, is under contract with Princeton University Press for publication in 2022.
Helen has been honored with a number of research and teaching awards, including the University of Auckland's 2007 Teaching Excellence Award for Innovation in Teaching, the 2013 HERDSA-TERNZ Medal for a scholar who has made a major impact on the tertiary education research environment of New Zealand, and the University of Auckland's 2017 Research Excellence Award. Her evidence-based writing workshops and presentations have taken her to more than 1oo universities, research institutes, and other organizations in 20+ countries and on every continent except Antarctica.
Rising to the challenge of having had her travel wings clipped by the COVID-19 pandemic, she now specializes in facilitating experiential online workshops, masterclasses, and retreats that bring together writers from across the globe in a shared virtual writing space.
Research Interests
Academic writing
Research productivity
Higher education pedagogy
Academic development
Modernist literature
Digital poetry and poetics
Source: helensword.com
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