The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong
- Submitting institution
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University of Northumbria at Newcastle
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 22227657
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Goldsmiths, University of London
- ISBN
- 978-1-906897-95-6
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The product of an AHRC Fellowship and five years of research and writing, this 90 000-word novel incorporates its own critical reflection through metafictional, historiographical elements in the narrative along with a 7000-word reflective commentary. Content research included wide-ranging original, first-hand archival and field research, training in the reading of early modern court documents, and an extensive investigation of the historical period and the understanding of religion and witchcraft at the time. The practice research involved playing off the recreation of the period against investigating the archive as an actively produced site in a complex, multi-layered process of creative investigation.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong is an output from an AHRC Fellowship exploring the fundamental problem of historicism: how does one represent the past without appropriating it to one’s own position?
This was a practice-led project, the writing of a work of historiographical fiction staging or embodying its answer to the research question.
The novel is based upon a close reading of a series of accusations of witchcraft made by Armstrong in 1673 and now held in The National Archives. Armstrong’s story has gone untold in anything other than minor historical references because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence available. Using extensive archival and field research, experimental literary techniques, and relevant interdisciplinary theory (postmodern, postcolonial, and metafictional literary theory; cultural/historical/spectral geography; hauntology; historiography; archival theory; theories of practice research), The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong reconstructs the gaps in the evidence and problems of interpretation through a mode of fictionalisation which maintains a thorough respect for the available evidence.
The novel aims at resisting the domestication of the historical past whilst reconstructing the full strangeness of Armstrong’s evidence. It does this by framing her narrative within a self-reflective account of the process of recreating historical events, bringing to the fore the often-suppressed elements of subjectivity, reflexivity, and historicity in research. The originality of the overall approach lies in the tension set up between the resistance close attention to the historical material presents to imaginative practice and the contesting of closure the imaginative practice introduces to constructing historical evidence. In this it is a ‘historiographical’ rather than ‘historical’ novel.
This is the first work of fiction in Goldsmith Press’s Practice as Research Series, aimed at appealing to a scholarly and wider readership. It has been promoted through numerous engagement activities, including public readings, newspaper interviews, seminars, and national and international conferences.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -