For the Dead Remember : The Life of M. R. James

Jones, Daryll

ISBN 10: 019883523X / ISBN 13: 9780198835233

Verlag: Oxford University Press, Oxford & London, 2026

Beschreibung

A fine new copy. M. R. James: greatest of all ghost story writers. Every Christmas around the turn of the twentieth century, Montague Rhodes James would gather his friends and students together in his rooms at King's College Cambridge, for what he once described as a 'dark séance', in which he read a new ghost story by candlelight at midnight. But the ghost stories are only one aspect of the life and writing of this fascinating, complex man. Monty James was widely recognized as perhaps the outstanding scholar of his generation, a man whose academic achievements were unparalleled, and who became the foremost living authority on medieval manuscripts, on stained glass, on Biblical apocrypha, and on the occult. 464pp.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 063104

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: For the Dead Remember : The Life of M. R. James
• Verlag: Oxford University Press, Oxford & London
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 019883523X
• ISBN-13: 9780198835233
• Einband: Hardcover
• Auflage: 1st Edition
• Zustand: New
• Zustand des Schutzumschlags: New
• Verkäuferkataloge:
  • Biographies and Family Histories
  • Essays, Studies and Literary Criticisms
  • Bibliography

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

M. R. James: greatest of all ghost story writers, a repressed member of the English establishment struggling against changing times

Every Christmas around the turn of the twentieth century, Montague Rhodes James would gather his friends and students together in his rooms at King's College Cambridge, for what he once described as a 'dark séance', in which he read a new ghost story by candlelight at midnight. But the ghost stories are only one aspect of the life and writing of this fascinating, complex, troubled, difficult man. Monty James was widely recognized as perhaps the outstanding scholar of his generation, a man whose academic achievements were unparalleled, and who became the foremost living authority on medieval manuscripts, on stained glass, on Biblical apocrypha, and on the occult. He was also a formidable academic administrator, as Provost of King's College Cambridge and then as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, he led his institution through the difficult years of the First World War, in which many of his colleagues and students were killed. After the war, he returned to the sanctuary of his beloved Eton, which he served as Provost until his death.

James's life in Cambridge brought him into contact, and often into conflict, with many of the great figures and movements of his age, from Henry Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research to John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and the Bloomsbury Group, with which he had many connections. He was the friend of A. C. Benson, the teacher of Rupert Brooke. He was a repressed gay man, whose friends recognized this even where he did not. He was often troubled by modern ideas and tendencies, widening social access to universities, degrees for women. This is also a story of the profound consolations of scholarship, and of a man who found meaning on the wilder shores of human experience, in a world of demons and ghosts.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Darryl Jones, Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture, Trinity College Dublin

Darryl Jones is Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and numerous articles, mostly on nineteenth-century literature and popular literature. In 2011, he edited the Oxford World's Classics edition of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories. He is the General Editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes, for which series he edited The Hound of the Baskervilles.