Ghosts between the wars: History and the imagination in Proust, Woolf, and Greene (France, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene)

Ghosts Between the Wars: History and the Imagination in Proust, Woolf, and Greene explores Le Temps Retrouve, Mrs. Dalloway, and A Gun for Sale as narratives in which World War One haunts the landscape of the mind. Relationships with history and with other people are presented by Proust, Woolf, and Greene as mysteries that must be constantly and imaginatively re-engaged. All three suggest that our ethical obligation to imagine gains urgency in an era of crisis and division. In each text, division---whether between home and the Front, civilians and soldiers, ally and enemy---is both exemplified and undercut by some version of ghostly doubleness. Characters and places that appear to be opposites prove to have unexpected affinities.; I argue that all three novels have a shared focus on home as a fragile space of relative safety, and that each illuminates a different temporal vantage point on the war as traumatic event. In Le Temps retrouve, war breaks in as a current event, confronting the narrator with the shock of interruption. With home overtaken by front-line fighting, Combray is a space that bears both the marks of the narrator's personal past and the marks of the collective present, bringing disparate times and experiences into relationship. In Mrs. Dalloway, the war is recent trauma, coated over by a thin veneer of routine and sentimental patriotism. Yet, across the gap in experience that divides Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, the narrative weaves threads of authentic connection. A ghost story of sorts, it suggests that sensitivity to haunting is a mode of compassion. In A Gun for Sale, war looms again on the horizon, a seemingly inevitable repetition. Greene's thriller suggests that the future is shaped by what haunts us, by the dynamic of remembering and forgetting, and by our unwillingness to see ourselves in our enemy.; Informed by the work of Valery, Kermode, Nussbaum, and Bakhtin---and framed by the modern trauma of September 11---my project argues that narrative is a collaboration between imaginative storyteller and imaginative reader, serving as an intersection between the experience of history articulated in the text and the experience of history readers bring to it.