ABSTRACT

The 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.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

section I|70 pages

Ghostly Origins

section II|90 pages

Vital Spirits

chapter 8|9 pages

Playful Spirits

Charles Dickens and the Ghost Story

chapter 9|8 pages

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

chapter 10|10 pages

Haunting Memories

Death, Mourning, and Memory in the Ghost Stories of Margaret Oliphant

chapter 11|8 pages

Algernon Blackwood

chapter 12|10 pages

Conan Doyle’s Sceptical Reader

Ghost Stories, Science, and Spiritualism

chapter 13|8 pages

M. R. James

chapter 14|8 pages

Jamesian Ghosts

Romance and History

chapter 15|9 pages

Vernon Lee

chapter 16|9 pages

“A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe”

Edith Wharton’s Modern Hauntings

chapter 17|9 pages

“German Has a Word for the Total Effect”

Robert Aickman’s Strange Stories

section III|112 pages

Haunted Nations

chapter 18|9 pages

The English Ghost Story

chapter 19|9 pages

The Ghost Story in Scotland

chapter 20|9 pages

Haunted Wales

chapter 22|10 pages

“If You Build It, They Will Come”

The Strange Case of the English-Canadian Ghost Story

chapter 23|8 pages

The Ghost and the Darkness

Creole Hauntings in Caribbean Literature

chapter 25|9 pages

“There Was More in This Darkness”

The New Zealand Ghost Story

chapter 26|9 pages

Australian Ghost Fiction

chapter 27|10 pages

Strange Ghosts

Asian Reconfigurations of the Chinese Ghost Story

chapter 28|9 pages

Indian Ghosts

A Love Affair

chapter 29|10 pages

Shades of Dissent

Notes on Haunting in South African Literary History

section IV|59 pages

Haunting Sites

chapter 30|10 pages

Haunted Landscapes

chapter 31|11 pages

Transport and Trauma

Uncanny Modernities

chapter 32|7 pages

Ghost Walking

chapter 33|9 pages

The Ghosts of War

chapter 34|10 pages

Haunted Houses

chapter 35|10 pages

Children’s Ghost Stories

section V|57 pages

Ghosts on Screen and Stage

chapter 36|10 pages

Screening the Spectre

Ghosts on Film

chapter 37|9 pages

Enchanted Visions

Ghostly Media From E.T.A. Hoffmann to Alfred Hitchcock

chapter 38|8 pages

Spirits on the Air

Ghosts, Sound, and the Radio

chapter 39|10 pages

Ghosts and Television

chapter 41|9 pages

Cyber-Hauntings

The Online Ghost Story and Its Cultural Narratives

section VI|58 pages

Ghosts in Theory

chapter 42|9 pages

How Ghosts Became Disgusting

chapter 43|9 pages

Ghostly Animals

chapter 44|9 pages

The Ghost Story and Feminism

chapter 45|9 pages

“Keeping an Eye on Me”

Queer Spectres

chapter 46|9 pages

Postmodern Ghost Stories

chapter 47|11 pages

“Dead Letters”

Post-Colonial Haunting in the Work of a Materialist

section |11 pages

Coda

chapter 48|9 pages

Stories Not Like Any Others

Ghosts and the Ethics of Literature