An exciting and ambitious monograph on the idea of the subject-place conundrum and the poetics of spectrality in literature, Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature & Culture: 1800–Present first impresses the reader with its broad scope and multifaceted slant. The volume is a long-awaited sequel to Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, published in 2002, in which Julian Wolfreys set out to examine the spectrality of Victorian narratives. Divided into four sections, Haunted Selves moves to twentieth-century literary spectres and offers a phenomenological insight into ‘haunting, hauntology, [and] spectrality’ (2), while encoding references from diverse study fields such as history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and music. Inspired by Derrida's theories on spectrality, Wolfreys forays into representations of ‘self and world, self-in-world, world-in-self’ in the writings of Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Alice Oswald, John Burnside, Julian Barnes, amongst others (2).

Before delving into literary spectres, Wolfreys reflects on the complex notion of dwelling and the uncanny, both concepts presented as useful tools to comprehend the spectral process engendered by the interplay between subject and place in a literary context. Wolfreys weaves together theoretical insights from several interdisciplinary fields – most prominently philosophy and critical theory – so as to create an elaborate conceptual framework for his readers before turning to Hardy's ‘memory of Wessex’ (45).

For readers interested in Victorian studies, ‘English Losses: Thomas Hardy and the Memory of Wessex’ is a rewarding chapter in which Wolfreys proposes a different reading of Hardy's poetry, explaining that thematisation, much preferred by critics, would reduce the complexity of the poems. Instead, Wolfreys reads Hardy as an experimental or proto-modernist writer, arguing that Hardy is, par excellence, ‘a writer of the phenomenal’ and one of the great visionaries of English literature (45). In this chapter, Wolfreys does justice to Hardy's rich poetic legacy and engages in mapping Hardy's displacement of cultural memory, loss, and absence from an interdisciplinary stance. Hardy's Wessex is read as a placeholder for the past, ‘as a synecdoche, rather than as material place directly comprehended’ (45). Wolfreys also touches upon Hardy's photopoeisis and concentrates on the hauntological implications of the recurring trope of the ‘wight’ (53). Next, Wolfreys focuses on Edward Thomas's poetry and explores how Thomas problematises love as absence by placing loss at the nexus of human existence. Wolfreys sheds new light on Thomas's poetry by reading the poems as articulations of the ever-haunted subject always longing for an absent other.

In the next chapter, Wolfreys constructs a complex study of the poetics of the metropolis in Neo-Victorian novels and explores how fiction mediates the cultural memory of space in the texts of Peter Ackroyd, Peter Carey, Sarah Waters, A.S. Byatt, and John Fowles, to name but a few. Wolfreys beautifully maps the spectral Victorian London in the postmodern imagination as an organic city of shifting identity, as ‘a city of transformation, disappearance, and loss’ (110). Wolfreys aims to establish a theory on ‘the poethics of spectrality’ as the defining feature of neo-Victorian narratives (136). This section also includes a segment in which he explores the Modernist take on cultural memory and English identity, mentioning John Cowper Powys, Virginia Woolf, and Mary Butts, to name a few, as representatives of the Modernist zeitgeist. Wolfreys includes a refreshing chapter on English music, in which he analyses how the rock songs of the 1960s and 1970s embed ‘visions of English countryside’ and articulate the ‘perception that cultural memory is a precarious constellation of phenomena that haunt us’ (170, 181).

Finally, the study concludes with the exploration of landscape, self, memory, and (dis)place(ment) in the writings of Alice Oswald, John Burnside, and Julian Barnes. Through phenomenological reduction, Wolfreys discusses how these narratives participate in shaping ‘self and place, the experience and memory of place’ (1) and delves into ‘spectropoetics’ (235). As in earlier chapters, Wolfreys relies on a vast array of philosophical theories to lend conviction to his interpretations, mentioning Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty as primary sources for the theoretical framework.

Well-researched, diverse, and comprehensive, Wolfreys's thought-provoking interdisciplinary study opens up new ways of seeing ourselves and the world. A broad and wide-ranging monograph, Haunted Selves is a valuable contribution to English cultural and literary studies and is compelling reading for academics and non-academics alike. The book is an insightful mapping of what Wolfreys calls ‘the expropriation of the self’ and a skilful exploration of how English narratives simultaneously embed and enact the spectres of the self, space, and memory (3). Wolfreys weaves a complex web of literary connections, combining rigorous theoretical output with close reading of narratives which shaped the English literary landscape of the last 200 years, all written in a rich and stimulating prosaic style. Wolfreys is a gifted storyteller and sharp theorist, who often loses himself in the interpretation of literary texts, a fact which reflects his great enthusiasm for literature. This idiosyncratic aspect is definitely one of the highlights of the book: getting and letting oneself get ‘carried away’ in the wondrous worlds of fiction and simply delighting in the act of reading (199). All in all, Wolfreys invites readers to find new ways of understanding the poetics of space, self, and memory in a study that is a superb tribute to storytelling, celebrating the enduring power of literature: the quintessence of Haunted Selves is beautifully captured in the memorable phrase ‘through literature, we survive’ (19).