Ghostly Encounters Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present : Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from theNineteenth 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. 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 among 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, and eschatology), which imaginatively testify to our compulsion to search for evidence of the ghostly in our everyday encounters with the material world. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Information 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication 6 Table of contents 8 Acknowledgements 10 Notes on Contributors 12 List of Figures 14 1 Introduction – The Lady Vanishes Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly 16 The Rise of Spiritualism 16 Encountering the Ghostly 18 Notes 24 Works Cited 24 Part I Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly 26 2 ‘Strength in What Remains Behind’: Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing 28 Notes 38 Works Cited 38 3 Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story: The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ (1926) 40 Notes 52 Works Cited 53 4 Wilhelminian Apparitions: Ghosts and Desire between Science, Religion and Art in the German Nineteenth-Century Novel 54 Works Cited 63 Part 2 Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly 66 5 The Visual Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 68 Ghosts in Buddhism 68 Paintings of Ghosts in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 69 Ghosts in Kabuki 77 Martial Ghosts 84 Notes 86 Works Cited 87 6 Embodied Shadows: Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party 89 Tylor, Frazer, and Hertz 90 Surveying Awareness 92 2011 Responses 92 2004 Responses 93 1994 Responses 95 Embodiment 96 Christine Valentine and the ‘Third Presence’ 97 Katherine Young and ‘Embodied Shadows’ 97 Dividuality 98 Grief 99 Ashes 100 Mood, Place, and Sculpted Memory 101 Works Cited 102 7 Ghostly Presences: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak 104 The Nightmare of Presence 104 Lucille and Her Relationship to Space and Place 107 The Role of Lucille’s Piano 111 Edith as the Author of Ghosts 112 Notes 115 Works Cited 116 Part 3 Ghostly Legacies 118 8 Futurist Ghosts 120 Notes 132 Works Cited 133 9 Ghosts in the City: From Baudelaire to Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel 136 Works Cited 147 10 Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment in the Face of Ghosts: From Keats’s ‘Destructive Element’ to Hannah Arendt’s ... 149 Keats’s Ghost of an Eternal Destruction at Sea and the Modernism of Joseph Conrad 149 Destruction Turned Historical and Dialectical: Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 152 Works Cited 165 Index 167 "This volume of critical essays meditates on the evidence and representation of the ghostly in the visual, literary, and cultural imagination of Britain, Europe, America, and Asia from the nineteenth century to the contemporary"-- Provided by publisher