By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Haunted House’, by Virginia Woolf, both is and is not a ghost story. In less than two pages of prose, Woolf explores, summons, and subverts the conventions of the ghost story, offering a modernist take on the genre. ‘A Haunted House’, which first appeared in Woolf’s 1921 short-story collection Monday or Tuesday, can be read here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Black Cat’ was first published in August 1843 in the Saturday Evening Post. It’s one of Poe’s shorter stories and one of his most disturbing, focusing on cruelty towards animals, murder, and guilt, and told by an unreliable narrator who’s rather difficult to like. You can read ‘The Black Cat’ here. Below we’ve offered some notes towards an analysis of this troubling but powerful tale.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ is one of the most popular Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Doyle himself recognised that many readers would include ‘The Speckled Band’ among their list of favourite Holmes outings. It’s easy to read Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and enjoy them, with no additional analysis deemed necessary.
But closer inspection reveals its links to previous detective fiction and the reasons for its status as one of the finest of Doyle’s short stories.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was drawn to railway carriages. In her 1924 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in which she champions a more ‘spiritual’, impressionistic – what we would now call modernist – approach to fiction, in opposition to the more stolidly materialist approach of a popular writer like Arnold Bennett, she presents us with a hypothetical railway journey, outlining the attitude she would take to an imagined female passenger, ‘Mrs Brown’, and how such an attitude differs from that taken by a writer like Bennett.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a Gothic novel in miniature. All of the elements of the Gothic novel are here: the subterranean secret, the Gothic space (scaled down from a full-blown castle to a single room), the gruesome crime – even the hovering between the supernatural and the psychological.
In just five pages, it’s as if Edgar Allan Poe has scaled down the eighteenth-century Gothic novel into a story of just a few thousand words. But what makes this story so unsettling?