The Missing Text: A Study in Absence

This book presents an examination of textual implosion and consequent ʻloss of textʼ in contemporary twentieth-century English and European literature, but also in certain areas of South American and Colonial literature.

The Missing Text examines the multifold techniques used in order to accomplish this phenomenon and describes the effects which such ʻloss of textʼ exerts on those novels and short stories in which textual loss or misplacement takes place. The origin of a phenomenon which is here termed ʻThe Missing Textʼ may be traced back to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and even further back: its most immediate source may be found in his short story, ʻThe Purloined Letterʼ (1845); thus establishing the blueprint for the genre of the anti-detective story.

Although written in the mid-nineteenth century, Poeʼs seminal story is astoundingly post-modern avant la lettre, thus setting the scenario for a sub-genre which Dr. Geldenhuys terms ʻthe missing textʼ. This book aims to describe and reveal how the self-referentiality of ʻmissing textsʼ has irrevocably influenced world literature of the late twentieth century, in particular focusing upon Italian literature of the last two decades. The concept of the 'missing text' throws an interesting light upon developments in postmodern literature and may be found in works as diverse as those of Henry James, Nabokov and J.M. Coetzee; as well as writers such as Calvino, Eco and Sciascia. What did happen to that crucial letter on the hall-stand in The Turn of the Screw?