Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (A Ray and Pat Browne Book) - Softcover

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299199541 ISBN 13: 9780299199548

Publisher: Popular Press 3, 2004

Synopsis

    From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans’ conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today’s resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social issues.
    Spectral America asserts that ghosts, whether in oral tradition, literature, or such modern forms as cinema have always been constructions embedded in specific historical contexts and invoked for explicit purposes, often political in nature. The essays address the role of "spectral evidence" during the Salem witch trials, the Puritan belief in good spirits, the convergence of American Spiritualism and technological development in the nineteenth century, the use of the supernatural as a tool of political critique in twentieth-century magic realism, and the "ghosting" of persons living with AIDS. They also discuss ghostly themes in the work of Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Gloria Naylor, and Stephen King.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Popular Press, a Ray and Pat Browne Book

From the Back Cover:

"I know of no other book currently in print that explores with the same level of intellectual and critical seriousness the scope of spectral phenomena covered in this collection."--Tony Magistrale, University of Vermont, author of Poe's Children

"Ghosts are a booming industry, and this eclectic and engaging collection of studies, both literary and historical, addresses America's relationship to the spectral."--Lynette Carpenter, editor of Haunting the House of Fiction

About this edition

• Publisher: Popular Press 3
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0299199541
• ISBN 13: 9780299199548
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282