Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History

by Catherine Belsey

What do they want, the ghosts that, even in the age of science, still haunt our storytelling? Catherine Belsey's answer to the question traces Gothic writing and tales of the uncanny from the ancient past to the present - from Homer and the Icelandic sagas to Lincoln in the Bardo. Taking Shakespeare's Ghost in Hamlet as a turning point in the history of the genre, she uncovers the old stories the play relies on, as well as its influence on later writing. This ghostly trail is vividly charted through accredited records of apparitions and fiction by such writers as Ann Radcliffe, Washington Irving, Emily Bront�, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, M. R. James and Susan Hill. In recent blockbusting movies, too, ghost stories bring us fragments of news from the unknown.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Gothic

288 pages, Paperback

Published September 4, 2019

About the author

Catherine Belsey is currently Research Professor at Swansea University and formerly Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. Best known for her pioneering book, Critical Practice (Methuen, 1980), Catherine Belsey has an international reputation as a deft and sophisticated critical theorist and subtle and eloquent critic of literature, particularly of Renaissance texts. Her main area of work is on the implications of poststructuralist theory for aspects of cultural history and criticism. Her present project is ’Culture and the Real’, a consideration of the limitations of contemporary constructivism in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Professor Belsey chairs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, a research forum for discussion and debate on current views of the relation between human beings and culture.

Reviews

[Kleineleopardin · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 - nearly perfect, one of the best theory books on ghost stories I've ever read!

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Belsey takes ghosts and the undead seriously and reads them deeply and well. To me, this book is a labor of love, and I'll confess to occasionally, briefly losing the thread of her thinking, which could be me but could also be a consequence of labor-of-love critical writing. In any event, I read this one cover-to-cover and enjoyed it!