Putting the Supernatural in Its Place

Jeannie Banks Thomas is a professor at Utah State University, USA where she is head of the Department of English. Her many publications include Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories, which received the Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize, and Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (2007), coauthored with Diane Goldstein and Sylvia Grider, which won the Brian McConnell Book Award in legend studies.

"A fine collection of articles exploring the tension between the ethereal and the firmly local in supernatural folklore. The scholarship is up-to-the-minute, and the approach is engaging enough to invite any reader fascinated by allure of the inexplicably spooky."—Erika Brady, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of American Folklore “This book is a feast.”—Association for Mormon Letters “Brings together a number of different perspectives on the relationship between contemporary legend scholarship and place, exploring the ways in which the hypermodern world is examined through localized encounters with the supernatural. These essays could find a valuable place in a course on contemporary legend or American folklore.”—Journal of Folklore Research “A welcome addition to the corpus of folkloristic studies of belief and the supernatural. It will prove especially useful for upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminars on the topic of the supernatural, while specific chapters may be of interest to scholars working in such areas as fan studies, new media, film studies, Japanese studies, and tourism studies.”—Western Folklore