1st Edition
Ghostly Encounters Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
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.
1 Introduction – The Lady Vanishes: Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly, Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy
Part 1 – Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly
2 ‘Strength in What Remains Behind’: Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing, Mark Sandy
3 Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story: The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ (1926), Mike Pincombe
4 Wilhelminian Apparitions Ghosts and Desire between Science, Religion and Art in the German Nineteenth-Century Novel, Nicholas Saul
Part 2 – Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly
5 The Visual Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan, Rosina Buckland
6 Embodied Shadows: Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party, Douglas Davies
7 Ghostly Presences: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, Ann Davies
Part 3 – Ghostly Legacies: Modern and Contemporary Encounters
8 Futurist Ghosts, Stefano Cracolici
9 Ghosts in the City: From Baudelaire to Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel, Christopher Lloyd
10 Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment in the Face of Ghosts From Keats’ ‘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, Michael Mack
Biography
Stefano Cracolici is Professor of Italian Art and Literature, Director of the Zurbarán Centre
for Spanish and Latin American Art and Associate Director of the Centre for Poetry and
Poetics, at Durham University. He is author of Il ritratto di Archigynia: Filippo Nuvoloni
(1441-1478) e il suo Dyalogo d’amore (2009), and co-author, with Stefano Carrai and
Monica Marchi, of La letteratura a Siena nel Quattrocento. He is completing a monograph
on Fabiola: lo spettacolo del martirio (forthcoming, 2020).
Mark Sandy is Professor of English at the Durham University. He is a member of the Centre
for Poetry and Poetics, an advisory board member of the Centre for Death and Life Studies,
and a co-founding member of the ‘Romantic Dialogues and Legacies’ research group at
Durham University. He is author of Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (2005) and
Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013). His most recent book explores Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment (2020).
