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Taking up the comparative case of modern phantasmagoria, this epilogue resituates the book as offering a hitherto neglected, but important, prehistory to the Christianizing belief in ghosts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages on the one hand, and on the other the rationalizing attempts in modernity to dispel or eradicate such a belief—if only to displace it elsewhere (e.g., the enchantments of technology, psychoanalysis, physiological theories of hallucination, etc.).

In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.

This conclusion shows how the different positions staked out by the writers in Beyond Return trace a trajectory that leads from anti-modernist resumption or rehabilitation (a willful regression that positions itself as a post-critical progression) through ‘bathmological’ meta-discursive gestures (a critical repetition that changes the meaning of conventions and forms) and finally to spectral poetics which blur the very possibility of defining a clear discursive position or literary self-identity. I thus suggest that Jean Rouaud, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Echenoz, and Antoine Volodine are authors that exemplify different approaches to the metaphor of return, ranging from narrow historical readings of literary aesthetics to more oppositional uses of form and radically decontextualized conceptions of literarity. Against the contextual reductionism of closed national histories of the contemporary, this study concludes by suggesting how different engagements with popular fictional forms allow us to imagine alternative literary historical narratives and new political readings of French literature.

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).

This chapter examines Irving’s 1824 story ‘The Adventure of the German Student’ alongside his two earlier tales, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’, focusing on Irving’s radical rethinking of the historical tale as a site of ghostly returns. The presence of death and ghostly figures at the heart of foundational historical moments makes the telling and retelling of the historical tale a fraught endeavour. Irving’s seemingly harmless ‘ghost stories’ are in effect radical reinventions of ‘History’ as a constant problem to be grappled with in the here and now. In ‘The Adventure of the German Student’, the figure of the guillotine offers a prime symbol for this deathly presence at the heart of the historical event, casting it as always already horrific and showcasing History’s deadly and beheading forces at work on the individual and the collective alike.

The conclusion provides an analysis of the contradictory conflation of stylistic excess and thematic obscuration in Jiang Wen’s film, The Sun Also Rises. In its juxtaposition of hyperactivity and death, often suicide, of characters, the film represents a dilemma facing the Forsaken Generation: how to the spectrality of the socialist legacy. Engaging with Jacques Derrida as well as Walter Benjamin, it suggests this generation of independent filmmakers as contemporary China’s “luckless but hopeful angels of history.” The conclusion ends with a poem by the author that distills the spirit of this book in a powerful dream image.