The Ghost

(Paperback)

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Description

A revelatory cultural history revealing what spirits, ghosts and apparitions can tell us about our culture, and about ourselves.



Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire. Our conceptions of ghosts - the fears they provoke, the forms they take - are connected to the conventions and beliefs of each particular era, from the marauding undead of the Middle Ages to the psychologically charged presences of our own age. The ghost is no less than the mirror of the times.

This dazzling new cultural history explores the ghost through the work of an extraordinary range of artists and writers, including William Hogarth, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Susan Hiller and Jeremy Deller; John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters.

Reviews

The Ghost: A Cultural History is a work of profound scholarship and imaginative engagement, beautifully written and elegantly constructed. It's the finest study of its kind I've read. -- John Harwood

A lively guide to the most persistent of spooky figures... This book shows why ghosts have survived amid scientific,
political and religious revolutions

-- Rachel Lloyd
Illuminating and entertaining, with lavish illustrations and eloquent narration. -- Wendy Moore
A scholarly and entertaining survey of ghosts . . . rich in quotes and anecdote. **** -- Laura Freeman
A very interesting book -- Tracy Chevalier

'[Owens] intelligently and engagingly tells the story of each particular ghost . . . she demonstrates the skill of
interpretation again and again . . . [t]horough research makes Owens the best of guides through the realms of ghostdom

-- David Lilington

[The Ghost: A Cultural History] both intrigues and informs . . . erudite, insightful and always entertaining, Susan Owens
traces each permutation with consummate skill in a volume as handsome as it is readable.

-- Martin Williams

Author Bio

Dr Susan Owens is an art historian and curator. Formerly Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, she has published and lectured widely on British art and co-authored books on decadent interiors, natural history illustration, watercolours, drawings and self-portraits.