ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the key contexts for understanding the cultural prominence of the nineteenth-century ghost story, namely “the “phantasmagoria” of commodity culture that has come to define Victorian “sensation”, with its rich tableau of new aesthetic forms. It shows, Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost”, as well as being a playful satirical debunking of “psychical research”, also draws on its author’s knowledge of advanced mathematical research into the “fourth dimension” as a way to suggestively undermine any reductive Victorian concept of “material” existence. The book argues that while the ghost story in Scotland has an opaque genealogy and an interrupted tradition, the form persistently enquires “into its own manner of telling” from the early nineteenth century. It analyzes the ways in which American ghost stories participate in the nation-building project, but also critique those founding myths.
