ABSTRACT

This volume reflects on the ghostly and its varied manifestations including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. These unsettling presences of the spectral other occur in literature, history, film, and art. The ghostly (and its artistic, literary, filmic, and cultural representations) remains of burgeoning interest and debate to twenty-first century literary critics, cultural historians, art historians, and linguists. Our collection of essays considers the wider implications of these representations of the ghostly and notions of the spectral to define a series of different, but inter-related, cultural topics (concerned with questions of ageing, the uncanny, the spectral, spiritualism, eschatology), which imaginatively testify to our compulsion to search for evidence of the ghostly in our everyday encounters with the material world.

chapter 1|10 pages

Introduction – The Lady Vanishes

Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly

part I|40 pages

Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly

chapter 2|12 pages

‘Strength in What Remains Behind’

Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing

chapter 3|14 pages

Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story

The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ (1926)

chapter 4|12 pages

Wilhelminian Apparitions

Ghosts and Desire between Science, Religion and Art in the German Nineteenth-Century Novel

part 2|51 pages

Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly

chapter 6|15 pages

Embodied Shadows

Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party

chapter 7|13 pages

Ghostly Presences

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak

part 3|49 pages

Ghostly Legacies

chapter 8|16 pages

Futurist Ghosts

chapter 9|13 pages

Ghosts in the City

From Baudelaire to Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel

chapter 10|18 pages

Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment in the Face of Ghosts

From Keats’s ‘Destructive Element’ to Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Hegel’s Dialectics as Colonialism’s Revenant in Twentieth-Century Totalitarianism