The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
- Submitting institution
-
Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2643
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Granta
- ISBN
- 9781783783946
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- 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
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Alarming Palsy of James Orr is a novel which asks a number of distinct research questions, both in terms of its form and content. The story of a man whose life unravels following the abrupt diagnosis of Bell’s Palsy, it constitutes a contemporary revisiting and updating of Kafka – in particular of Metamorphosis – and asks whether the narrative of an abrupt alienation from bourgeois society and routines brought about by physical transformation remains resonant and dramatic. It also asks to what degree and with what success this can be achieved – and perhaps can only be achieved – through a tragic-comic mode. The novel also explores and develops a form of ‘suburban gothic’, where elements of the gothic tradition – in particular Edgar Allan Poe – are married to contemporary realism, a tension which is found to be both formally and creatively fruitful. This sensibility draws to a degree, on the work of James Lasdun, and in particular on his novel The Horned Man. In contrasting the mannered bourgeois world of the protagonist’s previous existence with the comfort and strangeness that he finds in the pastoral setting of the woods that border his house, the novel also asks questions about the relationship between the pastoral and the civilized, and notions of wildness and entropy._x000D_
_x000D_
The Alarming Palsy of James Orr was published in both the UK and The United States and was widely reviewed, including in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -