My book :)

[dryad_wombat]

Hi everyone!

I am filled with glee! My book is now for sale on Amazon, and they've also shoved the first six pages up, so you can peer at it free. (I don't earn anything from the purchase.)

Here is a Wordle word cloud for it too. :)




Here is an overview:
This book examines 'home front' literature of the Second World War, arguing that Gothic tropes and forms mark moments of fracture in the national mythologies of wartime home, city and fellowship. These works in the Gothic mode subvert mythologies of nation that are still influential
today. Anna Kavan, Mervyn Peake, Elizabeth Bowen, Roy Fuller, Henry Green and others present counter-stories to the dominant national mythology of British survival and emotional resilience. In the texts of this monograph, the city grows strange, time distorts, and hallucinatory narrative voices depict a nightmare realm.

Doubling, temporal dislocation, narrative disjunction and tropes of haunting gather around shadowy figures on the margin of the nation. This book moves from city streets, to hospitals and prisons, to factories, to homes and finally to morgues. Each location presents a London that is, in the words of Mervyn Peake, 'half masonry, half pain', and which speaks in powerful ways for our contemporary moment.

Table of contents:

Introduction: The Urban Gothic of the British Home Front

Nightmare City: Gothic Flânerie and Wartime Spectacle in Henry Green and Roy Fuller

Carceral City, Cryptic Signs: Wartime Fiction by Anna Kavan and Graham Greene

Gothic, Mechanised Ghosts: Wartime Industry in Inez Holden, Anne Ridler and Diana Murray Hill

Elizabeth Bowen's Uncanny Houses

'The Rubbish Pile and the Grave': Nation and the Abject in John Piper, Graham Sutherland and
Mervyn Peake

Afterword: The Politics of Lamentation