Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture

by María del Pilar Blanco (Editor), Esther Pereen (Editor)

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory

360 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

Reviews

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Popular Ghosts is a survey of 21st century spectral fiction, tv, movies, music, and vidya games. The chapters are individual scholarly essays with up to date citations and bibliography.

This book will be a help to students hunting topics approaches for high school and undergraduate writing assignments.

[M. Pierce Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just picked through a few of the essays here.