Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

This volume reflects on the ghostly and its varied manifestations including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. These unsettling presences of the spectral other occur in literature, history, film, and art. The ghostly (and its artistic, literary, filmic, and cultural representations) remains of burgeoning interest and debate to twenty-first century literary critics, cultural historians, art historians, and linguists. Our 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.

Stefano Cracolici is Professor of Italian Art and Literature, Director of the Zurbarán Centre

for Spanish and Latin American Art and Associate Director of the Centre for Poetry and

Poetics, at Durham University. He is author of Il ritratto di Archigynia: Filippo Nuvoloni

(1441-1478) e il suo Dyalogo d’amore (2009), and co-author, with Stefano Carrai and

Monica Marchi, of La letteratura a Siena nel Quattrocento. He is completing a monograph

on Fabiola: lo spettacolo del martirio (forthcoming, 2020).

Mark Sandy is Professor of English at the Durham University. He is a member of the Centre

for Poetry and Poetics, an advisory board member of the Centre for Death and Life Studies,

and a co-founding member of the ‘Romantic Dialogues and Legacies’ research group at

Durham University. He is author of Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (2005) and

Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013). His most recent book explores Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment (2020).