Literature
Ghost Stories
"Ghost Stories" is a genre of literature that focuses on supernatural elements, often involving spirits, hauntings, and unexplained phenomena. These stories aim to evoke fear, suspense, and a sense of the unknown in the reader. They often explore themes of mortality, the afterlife, and the boundaries between the natural and supernatural realms.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
8 Key excerpts on "Ghost Stories"
eBook - PDFThe Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City
Paris, London, New York
- Nicholas Daly(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Like folk tales, the literary ghost story tends to be short and, in narrative terms, economical; it was, in fact, tailor-made for magazine publication. This should remind us that while ghost fiction was an aspect of late popular Romanticism, it was also part of the commodification of the supernatural that E. J. Clery traces in her account of the rise of gothic: as comic sketches about the Cock Lane ghost of 1762 anticipated, “freed from the service of doctrinal proof, the ghost was to be caught up in the machine of the economy; it was available to be processed, reproduced, packaged, marketed and distributed by the engines of cultural production”. 6 In this context, the opposition of belief/disbelief grows less relevant, and fear of the supernatural becomes available as a thrilling or a chilling commodity- experience for the literary market. The ghost story becomes something to be savored self-consciously. Like the demographic imagination more generally, the literary history of the supernatural is not confined by national boundaries. Supernatural stories from the United States, France, and Germany were widely read and drawn upon by British writers – the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Honoré de Balzac, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, among others, as well as folk tales of terror. 7 Moreover, as the writers I have listed so far suggest, when we disaggregate the “English ghost story” we find that many of its The ghost comes to town 79 authors were not English at all, and alongside such figures as Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, Gaskell, and Edwards there is a long line of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish writers. The Scots include Walter Scott, Margaret Oliphant, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was an important conduit for the circulation of supernatural fiction. Among Welsh writers in the Victorian period, Rhoda Broughton (J. S. Le Fanu’s niece) and Arthur Machen stand out.
- Helen L. Parish(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Ghost-stories, then, in this broad sense, are abundant in all forms of mediaeval literature; in this paper I shall be concentrating almost entirely on mediaeval Latin literature, although much of my argument might equally well be applied to the vernacular literatures of the period. The stories I shall be discussing come from all kinds of texts – histories of the world, chronicles of contemporary life, theological and even scientific treatises, lives of saints and the remarkable Libri Exemplorum , – preachers’ manuals of edifying and usually miraculous tales for use in sermons. Different as the various genres sound, the material is in fact surprisingly homogeneous, and we may note three qualities common to them all. Firstly, they were all written by men who, whether English or German, French or Italian, all shared the same common literary culture – the Bible, the Church Fathers, the Lives of the Saints, and a few of the classics. This literary culture was by our standards extremely small – a hundred books would have been regarded as a very substantial academic library. Thus inevitably, all our writers betray the influence of the same models; indeed we often find exactly the same story told in exactly the same words in perhaps half a dozen different texts. Secondly, all our stories were written down by churchmen; some of them, like the preaching exempla, were written with an CHAPTER 8 THE ROLE OF THE GHOST-STORY IN MEDIAEVAL CHRISTIANITY R. A. Bowyer Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe 170 overtly didactic purpose; but all of them, directly or indirectly, serve to confirm the teachings of the mediaeval church: they confirm that righteousness will be rewarded and wickedness will be punished; they confirm the church’s teachings about heaven, hell, and purgatory; they confirm the efficacy of the church’s prayers and masses for the dead, and of its absolutions for sins committed.
eBook - PDF- Alfred Bendixen, James Nagel(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Ghost Stories can be seen as “vehicles for nostalgia” and “attempts to understand the past” (Punter 425) in that they reestablish a certain form of historical continuity by linking past to present precisely when such a linkage seems threatened. However, ghosts serve to link the living and the dead in the present: an explanation provided for the rise of both Spiritualism and Ghost Stories in the Victo- rian era is the need for consolation following bereavement, especially in the wake of the American Civil War. Spiritualism soothed those who had suffered loss by assuring them that the dead were not really gone, but “continued to dwell in a nearby invisible realm, invited communication with the living, and awaited a happy future meeting with those who had mourned them in this life” (Castle 133). Ghost Stories, like Spiri- tualism, play out the fantasy that the dead are not really dead. Although the encounter with the ghost can be uncomfortable, if not terrifying, the terror of death itself is diminished because separation from loved ones is shown to be only temporary. Another explanation provided by literary historians and critics for the rise of super- natural fiction in the nineteenth century is that this genre develops in conjunction with and gives expression to modern conceptions of human psychology. For example, the ghost story is frequently discussed as a means for repressed material to achieve expression. Along these lines, Glen Cavaliero writes that “[g]host stories express their author’ s (and their hearers’) submerged or unacknowledged insecurites” (23), and Kerr, Crowley, and Crow maintain that “[n]ineteenth-century supernatural fiction provided a vehicle for the covert exploration of forbidden psychosexual themes” (5). More generally, supernatural fiction in the nineteenth century, especially in the hands of women, became one privileged tool for the disguised or muted expression of political critique.
eBook - ePubVisions of an Unseen World
Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth Century England
- Sasha Handley(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Readers were presented, for example, with new challenges to the authenticity of Ghost Stories by reports of the latest advances in optical research. The drive for social distinction which was implicit in the periodical genre meant that the sensationalized Ghost Stories of cheap print were increasingly rejected due to the lowly status of their authors. This is, however, a story of endurance and adaptation as well as erosion. Periodicals subjected Ghost Stories and ghost beliefs to a process of refinement but not to outright rejection. Ghost Stories appeared in these publications at frequent intervals in these years because they fed into a number of important cultural debates. These included the nature of the soul and its post-mortem location, the survival of individual personality in the afterlife, epistemological contests between ancient philosophy and modern empiricism and the continuing debate about how far human reason could supplant revelation as the guiding principle of religious life. Periodicals emphasized the patchy acceptance of purely naturalistic explanations of the world by printing, and often promoting, intellectual counter-currents. The historical correlation between enlightenment and the anti-marvellous will also be qualified by illustrating the role played by Ghost Stories in the periodical press. It will become clear in the following pages that Ghost Stories made a very real contribution to developments in natural philosophy and medicine. 2 Ghosts also featured prominently in more pessimistic, poetic reflections on the fragility of human life, and the decay of the natural world
eBook - PDF- T. Moore(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
C h a p t e r 4 Ghost Stories at Christmas In terms of genre, ghostly tales at Christmas knew no bounds. Christmas ghosts flitted into novels, poems, periodical short stories, and even collections of nonfiction history. An 1873 Belgravia ghost story opens with one entrepreneurial character, Tom Chester, and his plan to commodify a haunted house: “Rejoice with me . . . Yes, rejoice with me; I have discovered a new sensation.” 1 Editors of magazines had been counting on this very sensation to support Christmas sales for some twenty years by the time Belgravia printed Maurice Davies’s story, but the print tradition goes back even further and into other genres. Tom has discovered a haunted house, and he plans to investi- gate the ghost with the intention of renting the space out for séances, since “[s]pirits are decidedly looking up just now.” 2 Haunting spirits and manor-house ghosts had been “looking up” since the 1820s when annuals relied on ghosts, but a new spate of magazines and journals of the 1850s turned to the oral tradition of Christmas Ghost Stories as publishers sought to fill special Christmas numbers. Creators of the different genres of Christmas print material sought to harness the ghost story and channel its cultural appeal into new and profitable formats. All of the Christmas genres I have discussed so far regularly exploited the early association between the holiday and the ghost story. In their helpful overview of book history, John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten state that “future historians will have to cope with the ambiguities of a print culture—the ways in which it supersedes without erasing oral and visual cultures and spawns its own imita- tions, rejections, and assimilations.” 3 Studies of English Ghost Stories like Julia Briggs’s Night Visitors trace the explosion of the genre to V i c t o r i a n C h r i s t m a s i n P r i n t 82 periodical literature.
eBook - PDF- Andrew Smith(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
the dead the ghost story ostensibly raises some radical, putatively metaphysical, questions about identity. However, the structure of the ghost story often appears less unsettling, as its conventionality and easy-going fireside ambience creates, at least in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, a mood which is antithetical to grand metaphysical debate. David Punter in The Literature of Terror argues that during the early part of the twentieth century the ghost story entered ‘a highly mannered phase’ 1 which culminated in ‘the shockingly bland tones of M. R. James’ (p. 68 ). Indeed, for Punter, James’s settings are often little more than ‘Gothic stere-otypes’ (p. 89 ), and although his formulaic constructions might possess a certain Gothic style, they are fundamentally devoid of radical content: ‘They work well, but they mean almost nothing’ (p. 90 , emphasis in original). For William Hughes, ‘James’s tales construct an almost idyllic late-Victorian and Edwardian world’ consisting of the quiet ‘College Combination Room, the library, or the cathedral close’. 2 Even the Gothic’s fascination with extreme mental states is absent because, as Julia Briggs claims, in James’s tales ‘psychology is totally and defiantly excluded’. 3 This version of James implies that his writings are dominated by a narrative mannerism which excludes any troubling Gothic ele-ments, or political or cultural conflicts. This has led Clive Bloom to argue that James’s tales refer to ‘a world both slower and more stable’ than the ‘modernistic’ period in which he was writing. 4 This issue of the retrospective nature of James’s writing and how it relates to modernism will be returned to. However, the idea that James’s tales represent stable worlds is di ffi cult to reconcile with the prevalence of death, abduction, and demonic hauntings which so often characterise them.
- David Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, David Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander Malcolm(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
New York: Oxford University Press. Dalby, R. (ed.) (2006). The World’s Greatest Ghost Stories . New York: Constable and Robinson. Freud, S. (1955). “The Uncanny,” in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete The British and Irish Ghost Story: 1880–1945 95 Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. XVII. London: Hogarth Press (original work published 1919). James, M.R. (1992). Collected Ghost Stories . Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Lovecraft, H.P. (1973). Supernatural Horror in Lit-erature . New York: Dover. Sandner, D. and Weisman, J. (eds) (2001). The Treasury of the Fantastic: Romanticism to Early Twentieth Century Literature . Berkeley: Frog. Williams, Susan A.(ed.) (1992). The Lifted Veil: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women . New York: Carroll and Graf. 7 Finding a Voice: Women Writing the Short Story (to 1945) Sabine Coelsch-Foisner The modernist foregrounding of moment-by-moment experience was both conducive to the development of the short story and indebted to the formal economy which the latter required. It also seems to be especially connected with an image of the writer emerging in the late nineteenth century and coming to maturity during the first half of the twentieth century: that of the autonomous woman writer. It is a striking feature of English modernism that among its major representatives are some of the most outstanding women short-story writers: Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), Jean Rhys (1890–1979), Frances Bellerby (1899–1975), and Elizabeth Bowen (1899– 1973). While this nexus may serve as a starting point for exploring the work of these writers, it is equally apt to disrupt common notions of a modernist feminine aesthetics.
- Dennis Waskul, Marc Eaton, Dennis Waskul, Marc Eaton(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Temple University Press(Publisher)
GHOSTS AND H AUNTINGS / 55 ences. 1 These beliefs and experiences are undeniably real in that they have real consequences and can be studied independent of one’s position regarding the “truth” or “reality” of ghosts. Thus, my research is mainly focused on how people report experiencing a ghostly presence, the processes by which people arrive at the conclusion that they have experienced a ghostly encounter, what those ghosts do to and for people, and the consequences thereof. On the basis of the reports that I have collected, I have also created a general typology of ghosts and hauntings. This typology is useful for sifting and sorting the diverse array of experiences that people attribute to a ghostly presence, and that is the main focus of this chapter. Because reported en-counters with a ghostly presence are enormously diverse, it is helpful to have a framework that allows us to compare and contrast ghostly experiences that share common characteristics. In this chapter, I illustrate four ghostly genres, four forms of hauntings, and six types of ghosts by drawing on my previously published research (Waskul 2016) and more recent data. 2 GHOSTLY GENRES I identify four analytically distinct genres of ghostly experiences: “everyday ghosts,” “professionalized ghosts,” “commercial ghosts,” and “institutional ghosts.” Although these genres share some important characteristics, they differ in the ways they affect how people define, interpret, and ultimately experience ghostly encounters. Everyday Ghosts The term everyday ghosts refers to uncanny experiences that are not conven-tionalized by religious or spiritual beliefs. While religious beliefs and experi-ences share much with the supernatural, it is a mistake to conflate the two (see the Introduction). The key difference is that religious beliefs and experi-ences are vested with what David Hufford aptly coined “cultural authority” (1995: 18).
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
