Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914–1934

Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield, where he co-directs the Centre for the History of the Gothic. He is the author or editor of twenty-six published books including Dickens and the Gothic (2024), Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One (2022; winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith prize), Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History (2016), The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007; revised 2013), Victorian Demons (2004) and Gothic Radicalism (2000).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: the ghosts of war1. The Psychology of War: Gothic and the Redirection of the Uncanny2. The Ghosts of War: Writing Trauma3. Spiritualism, War, and the Modernist Gothic4. Aftershock: Malevolent Ghosts and the problem of memoryConclusion: Ghostly afterlivesBibliographyIndex

In the course of this finely argued book, Andrew Smith offers an important historicist revision of Freud on trauma and the uncanny before moving on to explore a hugely impressive range of ghost-texts written during the First World War and later. The criticism is acute and sensitive, the historical context vividly drawn.