Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture

(Paperback)

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Description

Haunting has long been a compelling element in popular culture, and has become an influential category in academic engagements with politics, economics, and aesthetics. While recent scholarship has used psychoanalysis and the Gothic as frameworks with which to study haunting, this volume seeks to situate ghosts in the cultural imagination. The chapters in Popular Ghosts are united by the impulse to theorize the cultural work that ghosts do within the trans-historical contexts that comprise our understanding of everyday life. These authors study the theoretical and aesthetic genealogies of the spectral, while also commenting on the multiple everyday spaces that this category occupies. Rather than looking to a single tradition or medium, the essays in Popular Ghosts explore film, novels, photography, television, music, social practices, and political structures from different cultures to reopen the questions that surround our haunted sense of the everyday.

Reviews

Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren are to be congratulated for bringing together such an exciting set of essays. The comparative approach uniquely pulls together studies from all corners of the world, emphasizing cultural differences in narratives of haunting whilst maintaining a strong conceptual coherence. Whether looking at popular fiction, canonical literature, film, TV or folklore, they rightly follow the imperative to historicise and contextualise the ghost. What results is a fascinating series of encounters that speaks urgently to our contemporary spooked state of being. --Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College
Reviewed on the Times Higher Education website, 16th September (UK) Lively, engaging and extremely readable: you do not have to be a scholar in the field to appreciate the many interesting observations on contemporary culture made here'
This impressive collection of essays lays to rest any notion that ghosts should be confined to limiting conceptual categories. Deploying a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary approach, Popular Ghosts rehabilitates ghosts from their dark shadows into the glare of the everyday and exposes the ubiquity of the ghostly, where and how it resides in the cultural imagination and beyond. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Reader in Literary Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol

Author Bio

Esther Peeren is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin, queer television, translation theory and the chronotopic dimension of diaspora. Her first book, entitled Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond appeared in 2007 with Stanford University Press and she also co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities (2007). Currently, she is developing a project on spectrality in contemporary literature, television and film. Mara del Pilar Blanco is Lecturer in Spanish American Literature, Santander Fellow and Tutor in Spanish, at Trinity College, and Associate Lecturer in Spanish at Worcester College, University of Oxford, UK. She has published on the haunted landscapes of the Americas, and is beginning work on a project dealing with the interface between scientific invention and poetic inventio in the works of fin-de-sicle Spanish American authors.