Vision And Vacancy

Underlying the melodrama and moralism, the orthodoxy and mysticism of Uncle Silas, W. J. Mc Cormack has discovered a 'sinister vacancy from which authority has withdrawn'. The remark might be applied to the whole body of Sheridan Le Fanu's fiction. "Vision and Vacancy" follows the course of his attraction to the void, and his resistance to it, from the beginning to the end of his career. By placing his work within the appropriate contexts of early apparition narrative and modern ghost story, English and Continental novel, Walton's study provides not only the most thorough account of the richness of his techniques but shows how cosmopolitan influences were an inescapable condition of his (Anglo-) Irishness.

A big novel about a small town... When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils...Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations? A big novel about a small town, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults. It is the work of a storyteller like no other.

Underlying the melodrama and moralism, the orthodoxy and mysticism of Uncle Silas, W. J. Mc Cormack has discovered a 'sinister vacancy from which authority has withdrawn'. The remark might be applied to the whole body of Sheridan Le Fanu's fiction. "Vision and Vacancy" follows the course of his attraction to the void, and his resistance to it, from the beginning to the end of his career. By placing his work within the appropriate contexts of early apparition narrative and modern ghost story, English and Continental novel, Walton's study provides not only the most thorough account of the richness of his techniques but shows how cosmopolitan influences were an inescapable condition of his (Anglo-) Irishness.