Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film

Lisa Kröger is a freelance writer and teaches academic writing to graduate students at Mississippi State University. Melanie R. Anderson is an instructional assistant professor of American literature at the University of Mississippi.

• IntroductionPart One: The Gothic and the Ghostly Chapter One: Haunted Narratives: Women Writing the Ghostly in Early Gothic Fiction Lisa KrögerChapter Two: City of Ghosts: Elizabeth Bowen’s Wartime StoriesStefania PorcelliChapter Three: Those “whose deaths were not remarked:” Ghostly Other Women in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Marilynne Robinson’s HousekeepingJana M. TigchelaarPart Two: Spectral Figures and Spectral HistoriesChapter Four: These Ghosts Will Be Lovers: The “Cultural Haunting” of Class Consciousness in Ian McEwan’s AtonementKarley K. AdneyChapter Five: The Spectral Queerness of White Supremacy in Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for WitchingAmy K. KingChapter Six: In the Spirit of Reconciliation: Migrating Spirits and Australian Postcolonial Multiculturalism in Hoa Pham’s VixenJessica CarnielChapter Seven: Haunting Mothers: Alternative Modes of Communication in Geographies of Home and SoledadBetsy A. SandlinPa

Kröger (academic writing, Mississippi State University) and Anderson (American literature, University of Mississippi) ask: what is it about the spectral that has held popular attention for so long? What does it symbolize for authors and audiences? What is a ghost? Existentially ghosts lie between fact and fiction, between the orbits of believer and nonbeliever, and provide bounteous fodder for storytelling, literature, and film. In 10 chapters the editors and their contributors offer a broad, comparative look at the place of ghosts in literature and film, and they see the ghost as a useful metaphor for death and the uncertainties of life. There are three parts: the Gothic and the ghostly; spectral figures and spectral histories; and spectral projections. This concise and interesting book is for scholars and the intellectually curious.