ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ghost story as a modern literary tradition and examines its relevance to postmodern fictions through the paradigms of the abject and the uncanny. In postmodern fiction, the ghost is far less metaphorical than it is literal. Viewing the postmodern ghost as the general uncanny implies that the ghosts of postmodernism have wider implications for society as a collective. In the case of the postmodern ghost story, the aspect of verisimilitude may still be in play but unlike the classic or Modernist ghost story, verisimilitude is less of a focus in the text. If the ghost story works as a universal narrative mode that conveys culturally specific meanings, the postmodern ghost reveals much about late twentieth-century cultural attitudes and the move towards scepticism and heterogeneity. A typical feature of ghosts in postmodernist literature is that their existence in the fictional world is not questioned.
