Author Biography
James Walton is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame. He has published a novel, Margaret's Book (1989), a collection of Anglo-Irish political correspondence, The King's Business (1996) and essays on literature (chiefly fiction) from Defoe to Joyce. He has taught British and continental literature, Anglo-Irish fiction and creative writing.
Description
Underlying the melodrama and moralism, the orthodoxy and mysticism of Uncle Silas, W. J. Mc Cormack has discovered a 'sinister vacancy from which authority has withdrawn'. The remark might be applied to the whole body of Sheridan Le Fanu's fiction. "Vision and Vacancy" follows the course of his attraction to the void, and his resistance to it, from the beginning to the end of his career. By placing his work within the appropriate contexts of early apparition narrative and modern ghost story, English and Continental novel, Walton's study provides not only the most thorough account of the richness of his techniques but shows how cosmopolitan influences were an inescapable condition of his (Anglo-) Irishness.
Introduction
- Hauntings, Domestic and Foreign
1 'Mad Feary Father'
- 'Schalken the Painter' and Le Fanu's Art of Darkness
2 Haunted Heroines and Others
- From Canterbury to Country House
Natural Supernaturalism
Names For the Outlaw
Vanity Fair
Notes
Works Cited
Index.
"Walton challenges his reader to discard prior preconceptions of Le Fanu as merely a writer of regional fiction and verse, sensation novels, or supernatural tales; and view him as an artist in a broader, richer, and greater European tradition."
Le Fanu Studies
2007
"Walton's main thesis is that there is a ‘sinister vacancy' at the core of Le Fanu's writing which he seeks to understand. He puts Le Fanu's work in its contemporary European context exploring how it was part of a wider cosmopolitan milieu ... Well up to UCDP's high standards of design and production."
Books Ireland
May 2007
"This is an extraordinarily detailed, sensitive study which builds brilliantly on the work already done on Le Fanu in the last few years, and is ... indispensable to any real engagement with this fascinating figure."
Studies
Autumn 2007
"Not just Walton's content but his brisk, readable prose make this book a ‘must' for aficionados of weird fiction."
Dead Reckonings
Nov 2007
"A dense and thorough book exploring a writer whose surprisingly modern nihilism set him apart from his contemporaries; recommended for academic libraries with deep literature collections."
Arts & Humanities Library Journal
Nov 2007
"the monograph is innovative and comprehensive ... a significantly scholarly milestone both in Le Fanu Studies and in explorations of the relationship between literature and consciousness."
Irish Studies Review
Winter 2007/8
"Walton's command of Le Fanu's work and the secondary literature on Le Fanu is apparent; with this book Le Fanu studies take a giant step forward."
CHOICE
March 2008
"Recent debates about an Irish Gothic tradition have generated much interest in the hitherto marginal figure of J. S. Le Fanu. If readers of Victorian shockers had never forgotten the author of Uncle Silas and ‘Carmilla’, scholarly attention remained patchy … In the wake of W. J. McCormack’s pioneering work … numerous articles and several monographs have rediscovered [the] author. [Walton’s] monograph is both generous in its acknowledgements of other scholars’ work and refreshingly free of critical animus. For all this, Walton’s take on Le Fanu manages to be relatively original in its focus on vacancy as a guiding principle in Le Fanu’s oeuvre.
Vacancy is read not only as a source of anxiety (a word that bedevils many analyses of Irish Gothic), but also as an enabling and fascinating condition for the writer. Walton links Le Fanu with European writers whose characters often include artists of dark authorial doubles, from the problematic creator’s of E. T. A. Hoffman’s tales to the demonic figure of Vautrin in Balzac’s novels … Another of Walton’s merits is the range of texts he discusses. Vision and Vacancy does not use them to shed light on the better known texts like Uncle Silas, but reads them in their own right to distil the core of Le Fanu’s aesthetics.
Vision and Vacancy is no Le Fanu primer: a familiarity with at least a few primary texts and with some of the central issues of Le Fanu criticism is essential to follow Walton as he jumps from text to text and from comparison to insight. But that he can do this so nimbly in the current context is a performance that experts will no doubt appreciate."
Raphael Ingelbien
University of Leuven
English Studies
Vol. 90, No. 1, February 2009 112–126
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