Entitled Ghostly Encounters: cultural and imaginary representations of the spectral from the nineteenth century to the present, this volume edited from Professor Stefano Cracolici from the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (department of Italian) and Professor Mark Sandy from English Studies, reflects on the ghostly and its varied manifestations including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. The collection of essays considers the wider implications of these representations of the ghostly and notions of the spectral to define a series of different, but inter-related, cultural topics (concerned with questions of ageing, the uncanny, the spectral, spiritualism, eschatology), which imaginatively testify to our compulsion to search for evidence of the ghostly in our everyday encounters with the material world.
During the IAS thematic year of Evidence in 2015/16, Professor Cracolici and Professor Sandy led ‘The Evidence of Spirits’ a fortnightly public lecture series, which reflected on recognising how ghosts constitute a common ground shared globally, which transcends other modes of modernity through which people conduct their lives. Ghosts dwell not in our world, but in fictional or possible worlds — in literature, in film, in art. Modernity, write Professor Sandy, it seems has freed us from ghosts; cultural imaginings have invented for them an interstitial space of superstition.
The collection is available from Routledge.
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