Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel argues that the Anglo- Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) is one of the most important, though undervalued, practitioner of the twentieth-century novel in English. This is an innovative study with significant implications for contemporary critical and theoretical writing. The authors contend that Bowen's work calls for a radically new conception of criticism and theory - and of the novel itself.

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's extraordinary essay of 1919, 'The Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche). Above all, Freud was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious, but strangely familiar.
As a ghostly feeling and concept, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers...

Facing the disarray and disorientation around his father s death, a man contends with the strange and haunting power of the house his parents once lived in. He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his father s life clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories, and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, his grip on reality seems to slip. Nicholas Royle challenges and experiments with literary form to forge...