Ghost-Words

Abstract

Susan Wolfson’s new book is about ‘spectral linguistic agencies, both on the field of Romantic writing and, reflexively, for our reading of the field’. Ghosts do not slot very easily into New Historicism’s prized category of ‘truths of immediate history’, and so any book which celebrates ‘apparitional presences’ naturally runs the risk of vindicating the theory that ‘the ideology represented through Romantic works is a fortiori seen as a body of illusions’ (Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 1983). There are remarks throughout Romantic Shades and Shadows that might seem to play into McGann’s story about Romanticism’s uncritical absorption in its own self-representations. ‘For Wordsworth, a mental specter can even usurp a material presence’, and that looks suspiciously like a mind-made distraction from socio-historical reality. But it is a distinguishing characteristic of phantoms and ghosts that you cannot assuredly say whether they are really there or not – they induce an ‘undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’. ‘Strange byways of writing, haunted recalls and recognitions, phantasms of a future, spectral pressures on shapes of composition: there are ghosts in these goings-on.’ Wolfson shows with great flair that it is possible to write in the shadow of McGann and Derrida without succumbing to their reductiveness.