Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded by Sir John Everett Millais,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt in an effort to revive
the simplicity of the Italian painters before Raphael. Many other
artists and writers joined their ranks, giving rise to an arts and
crafts movement that was governed by the credo “art for art’s
sake.”

The essays in Haunted Texts discuss the work of writers and artists
such as William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his
sister Christina, James Whistler, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Boyd
Houghton, and Aubrey Beardsley. Topics range from the technical
difficulties encountered by scholars in their studies, to gender issues,
to an application of Derrida’s philosophy to the works of Whistler and
Swinburne. The book includes short biographical notes on the various
contributors, an extensive bibliography, and 14 pages of illustrations
representing the work of Hughes, Morris, Whistler, Houghton, and
Beardsley.

Haunted Texts is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Professor William
E. Fredeman, the leader in the study of Pre-Raphaelitism from the 1950s
up to his death in 1999. Fredeman left an extensive body of work on this
era; Chapter 12 lists these monographs, letters, and excerpts from books
and articles. Chapter 11 is a reprint of Fredeman’s “The Great
Pre-Raphaelite Paper Chase: A Retrospective.”

David Latham is the editor of The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies and
an adjunct professor of English at York University in Toronto.