ABSTRACT
Constructing the war period as illusory, hallucinatory, and, ultimately, spectral, Bowen’s body of critical writing provides several cogent accounts of the ghost story’s literary status during and after the Second World War. The consolatory ghosts of the battlefield are quite different to the malign presences that populate other ghost stories of the time. After “The Bowmen”, the genealogy of the modern ghost story of war, which has yet to be fully articulated in critical literature, takes a number of surprising turns. One recurring feature of ghostly stories that depict the Front is that they may sublimate wartime horrors into consolatory, even jingoistic tales of extraordinary supernatural happenings. The apparition of the ghost, in such instances, acts as a phantasmatic screen onto which may be projected a whole range of emotions not often felt in the actual experience of conflict.
