Are the Ghosts in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw Real?

There are obviously three possible answers to the question: ‘Yes’ (or ‘real’), ‘No’ (or ‘not real’) and ‘Undecided’. All three have been offered – the first two often with much passion – by various critics in the past and the present. In this chapter, I will argue that while all three positions are ‘reasonable’, only one of the three positions is literary. I argue that this perception is essential to a definition of literature qua literature.