Spectral dissent: “Faultlines” in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger

Kirby, Emma 2025. Spectral dissent: “Faultlines” in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 10.1080/00111619.2025.2589419 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

There has been extensive criticism on how the gothic haunting in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger enacts an ideological challenge to heteropatriarchal and class-bound norms enshrined in Hundreds Hall. These readings convincingly examine the socio-political conditions of the novel’s setting and how these are linked to the haunting process. Other readings have approached the novel as a neo-gothic ghost story. Yet to date, few studies have combined a hauntological perspective with a socio-cultural framework, leaving considerable scope to explore how spectrality reveals the ideological tensions embedded in the text’s setting. This essay addresses this gap by placing the tropes of haunting and spectrality in dialogue with Alan Sinfield’s theory of “faultlines”. Drawing on Sinfield’s methodology and the logic of the spectral – in particular, Esther Peeren’s concept of “living ghosts” and their potential “spectral agency” - I argue that combining his notion of “faultlines” with a hauntological lens offers a compelling conceptual framework for re-examining Waters’ The Little Stranger, a text deeply invested in ideological conflicts and contradictions. By integrating cultural materialist and spectral approaches, this essay proposes a method for reading the novel’s spectral moments as manifestations of the underlying cultural anxieties of its neo-historical setting.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	0011-1619
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 November 2025
Date of Acceptance:	11 November 2025
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2025 12:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/182370

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