The Supernatural and English Fiction (review)

The Supernatural and English Fiction by Glen Cavaliero, the author of books on E. M. Forster and John Cowper Powys, is a 250-page cram course in supernatural fiction written in the British Isles, “from The Castle of Otranto to Hawksmoor” (as the dust jacket promises). Its discussion of James is limited to less than seven pages that cover ground already familiar to James scholars, so it is not likely to prove very valuable to readers of the Henry James Review. Critics and scholars with a general interest in the literature of the fantastic will not find the kinds of theoretical discussions of the subgenre of supernatural fiction found in well-known work by, for example, Tzvetan Todorov or Tobin Siebers. Cavaliero does not even acknowledge the existence of such work; perhaps this is because Cavaliero makes a distinction between the supernatural and the fantastic (though the title of Todorov’s book refers to the fantastic and not to the supernatural, both his and Cavaliero’s books discuss many of the same primary texts).

What The Supernatural and English Fiction does present are plot summaries of dozens of stories and novels and a taxonomy of British supernatural fiction writers. (In spite of the title, British supernatural fiction is the subject of Cavaliero’s book; “English” was chosen for the title, the preface informs us, because it seems more “familiar” [x].) The book discusses dozens of novelists and short story writers: it treats mainstream, canonical writers, like James and Rudyard Kipling, who along with their more typical work also wrote fictions of the supernatural; it discusses Gothic and Romantic novelists, from Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis to Mary Shelley and Anne and Emily Brontë; and it looks at major figures of the ghost story and horror fiction, like Bram Stoker, Sheridan LeFanu, and M. R. James.

The Supernatural and English Fiction presents British supernatural fiction as a rich, complex literary tradition of at least two centuries’ standing. This is the most valuable contribution of Cavaliero’s book to the scholarly study of the English language novel. Typically, scholars of the novel focus on the canonical writers Cavaliero discusses in the context of mainstream fiction. More often than not scholars ignore the supernatural elements in novels such as Wuthering Heights and consider the ghost stories of writers like James as an atypical sideline in the author’s career. Similarly, writers who worked primarily in the supernatural are perceived as marginal to the fictional tradition as a whole. Cavaliero’s book turns all of this around and presents a salutary reshaping of English language fiction writing since the late 1700s by placing such writers in context with each other, by comparing and contrasting their fiction as supernatural fiction, and by at times tracing lines of affiliation between later and earlier writers of the supernatural.

In emphasizing a solely British supernatural fiction tradition, Cavaliero excludes consideration of influences on and influences of the British tradition outside of the United Kingdom (unless James himself is such an outside influence). For the Jamesian at least, the contextualization offered in the first chapter of T. J. Lustig’s Henry James and the Ghostly is less exclusionary, since it addresses Western representations of the supernatural in general, from Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Girard. Although Lustig devotes considerable attention to Hawthorne, like other studies of James and the supernatural, such as Martha Banta’s Henry James and the Occult, Lustig focuses more on philosophical, psychological, and literary critical considerations of the supernatural than on its creative representations, so Cavaliero’s book, with James placed among primarily creative writers like John Cowper Powys, Phyllis Paul, and Mervyn Peake, is in rare company.

The treatment of individual authors and texts, however, is not especially profound. The method is to introduce an author and to give plot summaries of that author’s supernaturalist texts (Cavaliero uses the term “supernaturalist” in contrast to “realist.”) The point seems not to be to educate experts and scholars, and the absence of a scholarly apparatus...