The Curtained Room Hallucination and Late-Victorian Writing
Oliver Tearle
Oliver Tearle is a research student at Loughborough University. He has been published in such journals as Notes and Queries and the Modern Language Review, and has contributed to the online Literary Encyclopedia. Future projects include the co-editing (with John Schad) of a volume of creative-critical essays as part of the Critical Inventions series published by Sussex Academic Press (full details of the series available on the Press website).
According to Oscar
Wilde, ‘the primary aim of the critic is to see the object
as in itself it really is not’. Through a series of close
and often unusual readings, this book endeavours to develop Wilde’s
remark into a detailed and creative theory of reading. Or perhaps
that should be misreading: for, as this experimental work of criticism
negotiates its way among the works of a number of late-nineteenth-century
writers, particularly Robert Louis Stevenson and Wilde himself,
Tearle uncovers some of the ways in which we as readers are prone
to hallucinations while reading about, of all things, the experience
of hallucination. Focusing in detail on a series of neologisms from
writing of the period, such as ‘handconscience’, ‘figmentary’,
and ‘aftersense’, and moving between a number of disciplines
including literature, criticism, science, psychoanalysis, and even
linguistics, The Curtained Room endeavours to answer a
number of questions, ranging from the urgent to the downright bizarre:
What is the link between hallucination and social conscience in
writing of the late-nineteenth century? Is there such a thing as
textual hallucination? Why does the author of this book see a ‘snake’
that is not there when he ‘reads’ Jekyll and Hyde?
