The Routledge Introduction To The American Ghost Story

This book traces the historical development of the American ghost story from its Indigenous, Puritan, and Enlightenment origins to its heyday in the nineteenth century and continued vibrancy in modern literary and visual culture. It explores the main tropes, thematic preoccupations, principal settings, and stylistic innovations of literary ghost stories in the United States, and the ghost story’s rich afterlife in cinema, television, and digital culture. Throughout, the role played by ghost stories in nation-building, and the questions these tales raise about race, class, sexuality, religion, and science, will be examined. The book examines major practitioners in the field, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Edith Wharton, alongside prominent ghost narratives in cinematic, televisual, and online form, including podcasts, gaming, and ghost-hunting apps. This study also gives a new prominence to neglected or less familiar authors, including BIPOC writers, who have helped to shape the American ghost story tradition.

This book traces the historical development of the American ghost story from its Indigenous, Puritan and Enlightenment origins to its heyday in the nineteenth century and continued vibrancy in modern literary and visual culture. It explores the main tropes, thematic preoccupations, principal settings and stylistic innovations of literary ghost stories in the United States, and the ghost story's rich afterlife in cinema, television and digital culture. Throughout, the role played by ghost stories in nation-building, and the questions these tales raise about race, class, sexuality, religion and science, will be examined. The book examines major practitioners in the field, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and Edith Wharton, alongside prominent ghost narratives in cinematic, televisual and online form, including podcasts, gaming and ghost-hunting apps. This study also gives a new prominence to neglected or less familiar authors, including BIPOC writers, who have helped to shape the American ghost story tradition.

The Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centring on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.

The Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centering on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.

The Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centring on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.

An indispensable resource for students and researchers of paranormal myth and media, this book explores the undead and unholy in literature, film, television, and popular culture. Following an introduction to frightful manifestations in media, sections address ghosts, vampires, and monsters individually, and each section includes a broad consideration of the ghost, vampire or monster in American culture. The section dedicated to ghosts examines the "spectral turn" of popular culture and the ghost's relation to justice and mourning, with particular attention to Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. In the vampires section, the author considers the undead bloodsucker's relationship to anti-Semitism, suicide, and cinema. The third section discusses monsters in relation to topics such as global pandemics, terrorism, mass shootings, "stranger danger," and social otherness, with attention to a range of popular culture texts including the films IT and It Follows.

Telling an American Horror Story collects essays from new and established critics looking at the many ways the horror anthology series intersects with and comments on contemporary American social, political and popular culture. Divided into three sections, the chapters apply a cultural criticism framework to examine how the first eight seasons of AHS engage with American history, our contemporary ideologies and social policies. Part I explores the historical context and the uniquely-American folklore that AHS evokes, from the Southern Gothic themes of Coven to connections between Apocalypseand anxieties of modern American youth. Part II contains interpretations of place and setting that mark the various seasons of the anthology. Finally, Part III examines how the series confronts notions of individual and social identity, like the portrayals of destructive leadership in Cult and lesbian representation in Asylum and Hotel.

Ghost stories have played a prominent role in childhood. Circulated around playgrounds and whispered in slumber parties, their history in American literature is little known and seldom discussed by scholars. This book explores the fascinating origins and development of these tales, focusing on the social and historical factors that shaped them and gave birth to the genre. Ghost stories have existed for centuries but have been published specifically for children for only about 200 years. Early on, supernatural ghost stories were rare--authors and publishers, fearing they might adversely affect young minds, presented stories in which the ghost was always revealed as a fraud. These tales dominated children's publishing in the 19th century but the 20th century saw a change in perspective and the supernatural ghost story flourished.