Description
Book SynopsisThe Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centring on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.
Trade Review"An excellent introduction and overview of critical approaches to a genre often as odd as its spectral denizens. These essays demonstrate that the ubiquity of the ghost story is, in part, what makes the genre compelling, almost a riddle: ghosts are everywhere and nowhere."
- Aran Ruth, Supernatural Studies Association
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston
Section I. Ghostly Origins
Chapter 1. "Gothic and Romantic Ghosts in Novels, Dramas, and the Chapbook"
Diane Long Hoeveler
Chapter 2. The Ghost Story and the Victorian Literary Marketplace
Anthony Mandal
Chapter 3. The Ghost Story and Science
Sarah Bissell
Chapter 4. Oscar Wilde in the Fourth Dimension: Ghosts, Geometry and the Victorian Crisis of Meaning
Jarlath Killeen
Chapter 5. Ghost Stories and Sensation Fiction
Brittany Roberts
Chapter 6. Women Writers and Ghost Stories
Melissa Edmundson
Chapter 7. The Victorian Ghost Story and the Invention of Christmas
Dewi Evans
Section II. Vital Spirits
Chapter 8. Playful spirits: Charles Dickens and the Ghost Story
Claire Wood
Chapter 9. J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Alison Milbank
Chapter 10. Haunting Memories: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the Ghost Stories of Margaret Oliphant
Elizabeth McCarthy
Chapter 11. Algernon Blackwood
S. T. Joshi
Chapter 12. Conan Doyle’s Sceptical Reader: Ghost Stories, Science and Spiritualism
Kevin Mills
Chapter 13. M. R. James
Darryl Jones
Chapter 14. Jamesian Ghosts: Romance and History
T. J. Lustig
Chapter 15. Vernon Lee
Oliver Tearle
Chapter 16. "A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe": Edith Wharton’s Modern Hauntings
Emily Coit
Chapter 17. "German has a word for the total effect": Robert Aickman’s Strange Stories
Timothy Jones
Section III. Haunted Nations
Chapter 18. The English Ghost Story
David Punter
Chapter 19. The Ghost Story in Scotland
Timothy C. Baker
Chapter 20. Haunted Wales
Jane Aaron
Chapter 21. The American Ghost Story
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Chapter 22. ‘If You Build It, They Will Come’: The Strange Case of the English-Canadian Ghost Story
Cynthia Sugars
Chapter 23. The Ghost and the Darkness: Creole Hauntings in Caribbean Literature
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Chapter 24. The Latin American Ghost Story
Enrique Ajuria Ibarra
Chapter 25. "There was more in this darkness": The New Zealand Ghost Story
Erin Mercer
Chapter 26. Australian Ghost Fiction
David Ellison and Penelope Hone
Chapter 27. Strange Ghosts: Asian Reconfigurations of the Chinese Ghost Story
Katarzyna Ancuta
Chapter 28. Indian Ghosts: A Love Affair
Tabish Khair
Chapter 29. Shades of Dissent: Notes on Haunting in South African Literary History
Rebecca Duncan
Section IV. Haunting Sites
Chapter 30. Haunted Landscapes
Lucie Armitt
Chapter 31. Transport and Trauma: Uncanny Modernities
Ralph Harrington
Chapter 32. Ghost Walking
Scott Brewster
Chapter 33. The Ghosts of War
Matt Foley
Chapter 34. Haunted Houses
Nick Freeman
Chapter 35. The Children’s Ghost Story
Beth Rogers
Section V. Ghosts On Screen and Stage
Chapter 36. Screening the Spectre: Ghosts on Film
Murray Leeder
Chapter 37. Enchanted Visions: Ghostly Media from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Alfred Hitchcock
Elisabeth Bronfen
Chapter 38. Spirits on the Air: Ghosts, Sound and the Radio
Richard J. Hand
Chapter 39. Ghosts and Television
Derek Johnston
Chapter 40. Performing the Ghost Story on the English Stage
Kelly Jones
Chapter 41. Cyber-hauntings: The Online Ghost Story and its Cultural Narratives
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Section VI. Ghosts in Theory
Chapter 42. How Ghosts Became Disgusting
Pamela K. Gilbert
Chapter 43. Ghostly Animals
Kathryn Bird
Chapter 44. The Ghost Story and Feminism
Diana Wallace
Chapter 45. "Keeping an Eye On Me": Queer Specters
Ardel Haefele-Thomas
Chapter 46. Postmodern Ghost Stories
Maria Beville
Chapter 47. "Dead Letters": Postcolonial Haunting in the Work of a Materialist
Gerald Gaylard
CODA
Chapter 48. Stories Not like Any Others: Ghosts and the Ethics of Literature
Luke Thurston
Index
