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This chapter focuses on this struggle to perform a coded national exceptionality as main characters in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte attempt to reconcile a past haunted by civil war. Their main characters’ melancholic relationship with that past weaves a path toward self destruction that allows Faulkner and Cela to expose Spain’s and the South’s own inability to “let go” of its own “traditional” past as defended in each one’s Civil War.

Many of the chapters in this book engage with issues of time and temporality, either explicitly or indirectly. The linear or progressive time implied by the neologism ‘curatopia’ can and should be productively critiqued, not least in terms that recognise the infolded and paradoxical nature of the present—or ‘presence’—in everyday life. What we understand phenomenologically, through immediate perception, may return later to haunt us and the objects around us as a folding-over of time. The curator deciding what to collect for the future, how to interpret it in the present, and what it meant in its originary past, is also curating time—an intractable but dynamic project.

This chapter explores duration and the time-image of the horror film. The cinematic image moves across time in a complex trajectory. The apparatus of cinema manipulates and melds past, present and future, shaping our awareness of the properties of time and modulating our experience of it. The influence of Henri Bergson on Gilles Deleuze's film philosophy is crucial here. For Deleuze, time is pivotal to cinema's philosophical resonance. The temporal movements of horror films are fractured and nonlinear. The past threatens to dominate the present and also to shape the future in its own replicated image, which brings stasis. Time loops back and refuses to progress as earlier periods insist on their equal, or superior, validity to the present era. This is made overt in neo-Gothic films such as Robert Wise's The Haunting. In Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, ghosts are plausible characters unaware of their own spectral status. Jacob's Ladder presents a version of duration accessed at the point of death.

This chapter examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), a postmodern novel involving a woman from 1976 traveling back through time to the nineteenth-century world of slavery, and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006), a poetry collection focusing on the death of Trethewey’s mother and the forgotten history of black Union soldiers stationed at Ship Island, Mississippi, during the Civil War. Both texts show the haunting caused by the conflation of people with property, and both reverse the direction of this haunting to show the present haunting the past. This chapter argues that these narratives not only reveal that slavery haunts us; they expose how we haunt slavery. Through the haunting backwards allowed by time travel, the authors claim the property of history, a claim that rewrites the paradigm of power in slavery.

In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realizing various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed generically or defined theoretically, while for these very reasons they are always required to explain themselves. The diverse and paradoxical answers which essayists have given as often as not derive from the meaning of the word essai in Montaigne or from his account of his writings, and give rise to metaphors which have in turn shaped the subjects of the essay over the centuries. The thirteen descriptions of the essay here brought to a focus through Woolf’s essay are that the essay is a destroyer of generic categories, an apprenticeship, a haunting, a room of one’s own, homework, a bookshop, an assay, a taste, a ramble, an assault, a deformity, a sport, and everything and nothing.

Monsters and spectres might seem to be opposites: one embodied, tangible, chthonic; the other incorporeal, insubstantial and ethereal. They may conjure different fears too: horror, visceral shock and corporeal repulsion or uncanny sensations of psychic displacement, temporal disturbance and haunting. Yet both figures circulate around emergent media from the nineteenth century to the present, colliding with and contaminating one another. This chapter provides an introduction to the themes of the volume as a whole, showing how Gothic figures flourish, cross-contaminate and multiply, emerging in gaps and breaks, in ruptures between being and appearing, reality and representation, past and future. The media in question are, furthermore, crucial to this process: whether voice, writing, type, image, projection, vibration, hand, body, or something else, the modes that spectrally body forth or conjure up the Gothic articulate the crises, emergences and ruptures of which they are born(e).

‘Be Right Back’ (Black Mirror 2011-ongoing) fictionalises the possibility of reconstructing a deceased loved one based on posts to online social media sites as a means of managing grief. This chapter reads the episode according to a new theoretical framework, ‘networked spectrality’, which considers the relevant historical, technical, social, and political dynamics of digital networks as they relate to the concept of haunting. By paying attention to the affordances of networked publics, including the problems of context collapse in mediated social interactions, networked spectrality helps explore the significance of Ash as an enduring multiplicity of haunting and the uncanny in the lives of Martha and their daughter. As an allegory of contemporary media use, networked spectrality offers an approach to consider the implications of mediated remains and technical persistence in a society that tends to identify and articulate such encounters as spectral.

This chapter explores the reasons for the Brontës’ longstanding connection with haunting and the supernatural, and how this has been intertwined with processes of fictionalisation. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë in particular, it traces her connection with the supernatural back to Elizabeth Gaskell’s seminal biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Within Gaskell’s biography are embedded a series of macabre ghost stories that have the effect of supernaturalising and semi-fictionalising the life of its subject. This chapter demonstrates that Gaskell’s influence can be seen both in the commemorative ghost poetry of the nineteenth century, which we might think of as proto-fictional biography, and in the works of fictional biography that featured the Brontës as ghosts throughout the inter-war period. It follows the trajectory of Brontë’s fictionalisation by charting nineteenth-century commemorative poetry’s gradual approach to fictional biography in terms of its ghosts’ increasing communicativeness and vocalisation.

The first chapter on the sewers links the construction of the first underground drainage system with the sanitary discourse of ‘circulation’ that removed human waste from the city centre in an outward centrifugal movement. This displacement is then mapped onto distinct populaces of the city with the closest affiliation to the sewers- the ‘lower orders’, prostitutes and foreigners. Although the sewers are never explicitly mentioned, its omnipresence is captured in the aura of filth, from mud and fog, to ‘dust’ and slums, captured in Dickens, Gissing and Stoker. The selection of texts reflects the preoccupation with filth from the realist and the Gothic tradition, and how it serves as a structuring absence and an unknowable presence throughout the depictions of London. The polluting and purifying power of the sewers then reveals the contradictions inherent in the city, the subversive nature of the underground, and the buried anxieties in the Victorian imagination.

This chapter notes how traditional American gothic literature has been largely motivated by racial dread and fears of miscegenation. It then argues that many contemporary ethno-fiction writers repurpose gothic tropes and idioms to two ends. The first is to critique anxieties of American gothic in order to expose the racialism embedded in the assimiliationist and hegemonic narrative of upward mobility defined by the ethnic ‘melting pot’. The second is to use these gothic redeployments imaginatively to disinter the voices of those legions who have died and disappeared, un-mourned.

This chapter examines “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) in the light of commodity culture and the woman artist. It argues that, although the essay is structured around four transactions, Woolf's “shopper” is actually a participant in an economy at odds with capitalism—that is the gift economy. While the essay makes clear the pleasures of window-shopping, it voices a scathing criticism of the ruthlessness of capitalism, as the narrator moves towards participation in increasingly generous exchanges. Woolf's essay also demonstrates how a focus on generosity and gift-giving practices can “throw light upon our morality and help to direct our ideals” and can offer a different perspective on social structures and the organization of Western culture. In this way, ideas about the gift economy can help to illuminate the dynamic interconnection of the social, economic, and aesthetic in Woolf's fiction, as it can also throw new light on the social critique her work offers.

This chapter discusses how most of Woolf's essays are pedagogical in style, even when they are not so in content. Virginia Stephen's home schooling taught her about gender isolation and its impact on learning; her work at Morley College taught her about class exclusion and its impact on teaching; and her years as a reviewer taught her about different audiences and their impact on writing. Thus Virginia Stephen's struggle to educate herself shaped Virginia Woolf into an essayist who teaches, and that in Virginia Woolf's hands, the essay becomes a classroom. The chapter shows that between the time Virginia Stephen wrote “Street Music” in 1905 and Virginia Woolf wrote “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in 1927, hallmarks of Woolf's pedagogical style emerge: a questioning, conversational, and inclusive attitude and a stance that recognizes difference, clarifies position, and emphasizes process.

This chapter studies the use of haunted houses in contemporary Spanish films, drawing on spatial conceptions of the Gothic and in particular the argument posited by David Punter and Glennis Byron that postmodern Gothic spaces are unstably located. Following on from the discussion of haunting in the previous chapter, this chapter starts by considering the conceptualization of Spanish historical memory of the Civil War and Francoism in terms of hauntology (as hypothesized by Jo Labanyi). It also considers the problems and contradictions which nonetheless arise from it, not least the fact that, as Robert Mighall has pointed out, Gothic horror tales deliberately evoke ghosts and other monsters so that the repressed anxieties that are called forth may arise as much from the demands of genre as of history. The film NO-DO (The Haunting, Elio Quiroga, 2009) is taken as a case study to explore some of these contradictions through a comparison with the work of Jaume Balagueró, in particular the film Darkness (2002). Such contradictions serve to undermine the insistence of many scholars within Spanish studies on a default meaning of ghosts as repressed war memories.

The Eye (Gin Gwai, 2002) and its two sequels (2004, 2005) deal with pan-Asian film production, gender, and identity. The films seem to embrace a transnational outlook that that fits a shared Southeast Asian cinematic and cultural agenda. Instead, they disclose tensions about Hong Kong’s identity, its relationship with other countries in the region, and its mixture of Western and Eastern traditions (Knee, 2009). As horror films, The Eye series feature transpositional hauntings framed by a visual preference for understanding reality and the supernatural that is complicated by the ghostly perceptions of their female protagonists. Thus, the issues explored in this film series rely on a haunting that presents textual manifestations of transposition, imposition, and alienation that further evidence its complicated pan-Asian look. This chapter examines the films’ privilege of vision as catalyst of a transnational, Asian Gothic horror aesthetic that addresses concepts of identity, gender, and subjectivity.