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This chapter analyzes science fiction and the supernatural in Irish novels. These include books such as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom. Several ghost stories are also considered.

This chapter looks once more at the ways in which Browne's work, and specifically the fifth chapter of Hydriotaphia have provided Marías with a literary touchstone and vocabulary to describe loss, memory, and forgetting. This is explored through a detailed close reading of his ghost story ‘Cuando fui mortal’, a story in which intertextual borrowings from Browne appear. Marías's interest in ghost stories is also contextualized in his generation's predilection for literary genres which are traditionally associated with children—comic strips, supernatural fiction, swashbuckling adventure stories. Discussion draws on La infancia recuperada by Marías's contemporary Fernando Savater, in which the latter theorizes and explores this fascination. The chapter looks at borrrowings from Marías's other fiction, including Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí.

This chapter deals with two interrelated issues related to supernatural activity. It first describes and places in perspective the appearance of certain narratives that illustrate two different categories of supernatural experiences, namely ghost stories and narratives of spirit possession. Next, it tries to understand the role some aspects of traditional spirit religion and ritual play in the context of postterror Sri Lanka. This chapter also puts in context how certain aspects in the construction of the self vary between “normal” and altered states of consciousness, and how such variations are directly connected to the victims' perceptions of revenge and justice.

This chapter summarises Charles Dickens's view of the ghost story. It presents some close readings of A Christmas Carol, ‘The Signalman’ and ‘A December Vision’. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses ghosts to critique the economic system and to pardon capitalism. In ‘A December Vision’, Dickens tries to represent the ghost of the industrial economy as it spreads poverty throughout the country. Finally, it shows that Dickens's fascination with the allegorical mode of the ghost story and the ways such allegories can be read are addressed in ‘The Signalman’.

This chapter discusses gender issues by acknowledging the crucially innovative form of the female-authored ghost story. It focuses on the works of Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, and May Sinclair, who addressed themes of love, money and history. Riddell demonstrates an interest in the relationship between money and spectrality in The Uninhabited House, while Lee explores the place of women's writing within male historical narratives and even gives the notion of romantic love a historical inflection. Finally, the chapter takes a look at Sinclair, who questions the relationship between history and writing and examines the relationship between love, history and authorship.

This chapter addresses a different set of female anxieties — one that has less to do with outright violence and more to do with cultural expectations and social demands. The dominant issues in ghost stories by Victorian and Edwardian women do not concern women being murdered or physically abused by men but rather marriage and motherhood. In stories focused on these themes, the tensions between the idealized expectations surrounding feminine roles and the far less fulfilling realities of marital life for many women are brought to the fore. Ghost stories that address marriage, according to Catherine Lundie, deal with infidelity, psychological and sexual abuse, arranged marriages, and the incompatibility of partners. In this chapter the author surveys a variety of ghostly American tales by Victorian and Edwardian women that attend to the subjects of marriage and motherhood and that reflect differing opinions on the subjects.

This chapter introduces the ghost story, which previously incorporated a wide range of serious social issues. It examines the development of the belief in ghosts from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. It then tries to explain how to read the spectre, before ending with a detailed summary of the next eight chapters.

Recent studies of nineteenth-century American culture have begun to call into question the accepted wisdom of “separate spheres” for men and women. This is not to say that cultural expectations for men and women did not differ, but rather that they did not function in some monolithic way uninflected by other factors such as race, class, geographical region, religion, and occupation. The existence of the ghost stories included in this study in fact testifies to the permeability of the boundaries circumscribing male and female spheres of activity and influence because the women who wrote them — in large measure were “literary domestics.” The ghost stories addressed here also make clear the ways in which other identity categories complicate the separate spheres paradigm.

Ghost stories, perhaps more than any other class of story, are preoccupied with these anxious spaces. Hauntings in literature are almost always associated with particular geographic spaces — frequently houses — and, as Dale Bailey observes, the motif of the haunted house stretches back to Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” and occupies an important place in the American literary tradition. This revelatory function of the Female Gothic has generally been discussed in terms of Freud's concept of the uncanny. Avery Gordon asserts in her meditation on haunting in Ghostly Matters that haunting is “a constitutive feature of social life.” In the ghost stories, the force that produces ghosts — and sometimes renders the living ghostly — is the development of American capitalism and the willingness to make one's fortune through the exploitation of others.

This chapter examines the treatment of spectrality in Spark’s debut novel, The Comforters, as well as in a selection of early (and otherwise realistic) short stories. It discuss some of Spark’s earliest attempts to realise – to quote from her preceding study of John Masefield – ‘how sharp and lucid fantasy can be when it is deliberately intagliated on the surface of realism.’ The first half of the chapter concerns what is classified as the textual haunting, whereby the supernatural encounter is treated as an instance of metalepsis – a violation, that is, of the text’s diegetic boundaries, which is in some ways analogous to the ghost’s traversal of ontological ones. The chapter’s second section examines the significance of the ghost story as a vital means of critiquing forms of patriarchal power, along with conventional gender roles and their attendant expectations.

Shifting to horror, this chapter deals with how the civil war is represented by the Mexican-born filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro, concentrating particularly on El espinazo del Diablo/The Devil's Backbone, presenting a ghost story set in the civil war's closing months, and the relationship between the figure of the ghost and the past. Although by 1995 the civil war had been the subject of numerous Spanish films, even the free-wheeling post-Franco Spanish cinema has been extremely reluctant to tackle some of the thornier issues of the Civil War period. The chapter considers debates about the figure of the ghost in popular culture and its relationship to debates over the historical process, before examining the use of ghosts in this specific film.

This chapter examines how post-horror films engage with metaphysical and existential issues, with stories about protagonists’ attempts to gain some sort of transcendence thus serving as a way of imagining post-horror’s own mixed success at (for better or worse) transcending the genre itself. Films like A Ghost Story and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House transform the ghost from a vengeful, fear-inducing trope into a much more existentially wandering figure of unresolved grief and the impermanence of human memory. Meanwhile, A Dark Song uses occultism to echo A Ghost Story’s concern with individual grief’s relationship to cosmic realms of (non)existence, much as mother! and I Am the Pretty Thing ask whether artistic creation itself can play any role in personal or spiritual redemption.

This chapter explores links, in terms of imagery, symbolism, theme, and form, that exist between a range of rural-set texts spanning the period from the fin de siècle to the First World War. It argues that the evolution of the British rural Gothic in this period reveals sympathies between canonically modernist fiction (D.H. Lawrence and May Sinclair, for example) and more formally conventional texts (such as those of M.R. James and Walter de la Mare). This suggests a broader understanding of what constitutes modernist experimentation. The chapter also traces the influence of metropolitan and industrial modernity upon the rural Gothic imaginary, and considers the dialectical relation between these two cultural and geographical spaces. It ultimately argues that in the Gothic fiction and ghost stories of the period, we see rural Britain represented as a site of uncanny returns, in which repressed traumas, anxieties and violence re-emerge.

Catherine Belsey uses a historical approach to explore Shakespeare’s introduction of ‘mystery, uncertainty, equivocation (the components of the uncanny)’ to the Renaissance stage through an integration of ‘the popular tradition of fireside ghost stories’ in the intertextual web of his plays. Taking up key terms of the Gothic such as the macabre, terror, equivocation and the uncanny, Belsey explores Shakespeare’s use of ghostly apparitions for a ‘blending of existing conventions to change the parameters for fiction’, addressing uncertainties about the relation between spirit and matter, about the reliability of the senses. Belsey locates the difference of Shakespearean ghosts from earlier stage ghosts rooted in the classical tradition in their direct interaction with the world of the living, in the evocation of terror shared by the onstage characters, and in the persistence of uncertainty and equivocation.

Chapter 1 examines the first half of The Sword Went Out to Sea, her first postwar novel, arguing that its construction relies upon two disparate genres, autobiography and ghost story, that exist in an inexorable tension, constantly interrogating one another. H.D. wrote throughout her career in autobiographical modes. In this novel, in an implicit critique of her own previous autobiographical novels, H.D.’s narrator, Delia Alton, is so obsessively self-focused that her psyche becomes unstable and the narrative explodes under the pressure of its repetitive autobiographical excess. Readers are offered a tediously transparent autobiographical story that simultaneously asks them to believe, impossibly, in the materiality of ghosts. They are thus confronted with central, unanswerable questions about truth and the nature of reality.

This chapter goes to the formal analysis of the film's narrative by discussing the symbolic motifs which King Hu embedded within the film in order to interpret and build on the original story in Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi, a vital source of the narrative. The story is Xia Nü, rendered as The Magnanimous Girl in Herbert Giles's translation. Liaozhai zhiyi was published in its earliest form in 1679. Pu Songling spent the whole of his adult life writing and collecting the ghost stories and tales of the supernatural in the anthology. The appearance of the spider in the very first shot seems to set the film up for a psychoanalytical reading of the film, in that the recurring imagery of the spider and the web is an overhanging structural motif.

Liberal economists hailed free trade as the emblem of the spirit of sharing, even as they simultaneously emphasized the autonomy of individuals. Through metaphors of sexuality, writers of literary and economic texts responded to this ambiguity and explored the interpersonal consequences of national borders’ permeability to foreign commodities. This chapter first examines Thomas Serle’s popular melodrama The Ghost Story (1836) to discuss the comparison of commerce with sexual exchange. It then turns to the conservative economist and playwright John Lettsom Elliot’s Letter to the Electors of Westminster (1848), a political pamphlet that likens free trade to promiscuity. Elliot’s farcical comedy Five to Two (1851) similarly employs free trade as a metaphor for the adulterous flirtations that proliferate in the play. This chapter attends in particular to the operation of eros in drama. As flirtation resists disciplinary surveillance and challenges the authority of the patriarch, through that theme writers address the dissolution of the paternalist state.

This chapter dwells on the matter of ghosts and the psychological illusions preying on the mind of the male hero as the narrative progresses into the realm of the ghost story. A Touch of Zen begins with the proposition that the Chinese fort where the bulk of the story takes place is a haunted place and that the xia nü may be a ghost. This afforded Hu the means to delve into questions of superstition and belief in the supernatural. While A Touch of Zen is generally recognized as a wuxia film, Hu inducts a ghost story into the first hour of the film, the purpose of which is to prepare for the metaphysical exploration of the genre and the delivery of the “touch of Zen” towards the end.