This anthology explores the spatial dimension and politics of haunting. It considers how the ‘appearance’ of absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something that once was, and still is, (t)here. At its core, the book asks: how and why do certain places haunt us? Drawing from a diversity of mediums, forms and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to Spectral Spaces and Hauntings illustrate the complicated ways absent presences can manifest and be registered. The case studies range from the memory sites of a terrorist attack, the lost home, a vanished mining town and abandoned airports, to the post-apocalyptic wastelands in literary fiction, the photographic and filmic surfaces where spectres materialise, and the body as a site for re-corporealising the disappeared and dead. In ruminating on the afteraffects of spectral spaces on human experience, the anthology importantly foregrounds the ethical and political imperative of engaging with ghosts and following their traces.

"The stories in this book come from a session at the 2017 meeting of the European Society for Oceanists in Munich, Germany that brought together anthropologists who have studied hauntings across the Pacific. This book presents a diverse sampling of hauntings, dipped from contemporary cultures across the Pacific Islands"--

This study investigates the figure of haunting in the New Nature Writing. It begins with a historical survey of nature writing and traces how it came to represent an ideal of ‘natural’ space as empty of human history and social conflict. Building on a theoretical framework which combines insights from ecocriticism and spatial theory, the author explores the spatial dimensions of haunting and ‘hauntology’ and shows how 21st-century writers draw on a Gothic repertoire of seemingly supernatural occurrences and spectral imagery to portray ‘natural’ space as disturbed, uncanny and socially contested. Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane are revealed to apply psychogeography’s interest in ‘hidden histories’ and haunted places to spaces associated with ‘wilderness’ and ‘the countryside’. Kathleen Jamie’s allusions to the Gothic are put in relation to her feminist re-writing of ‘the outdoors’, and John Burnside’s use of haunting is shown to dismantle fictions of ‘the far north’. This book provides not only a discussion of a wide range of factual and fictional narratives of the present but also an analysis of the intertextual dialogue with the Romantic tradition which enfolds in these texts.

This study investigates the figure of haunting in the New Nature Writing. It begins with a historical survey of nature writing and traces how it came to represent an ideal of ‘natural’ space as empty of human history and social conflict. Building on a theoretical framework which combines insights from ecocriticism and spatial theory, the author explores the spatial dimensions of haunting and ‘hauntology’ and shows how 21st-century writers draw on a Gothic repertoire of seemingly supernatural occurrences and spectral imagery to portray ‘natural’ space as disturbed, uncanny and socially contested. Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane are revealed to apply psychogeography’s interest in ‘hidden histories’ and haunted places to spaces associated with ‘wilderness’ and ‘the countryside’. Kathleen Jamie’s allusions to the Gothic are put in relation to her feminist re-writing of ‘the outdoors’, and John Burnside’s use of haunting is shown to dismantle fictions of ‘the far north’. This book provides not only a discussion of a wide range of factual and fictional narratives of the present but also an analysis of the intertextual dialogue with the Romantic tradition which enfolds in these texts.

Located in the ambivalent realm between life and death, ghosts have always inspired cultural fascination as well as theoretical consideration.

An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places--and deep into the dark side of our history.

Haunted Landscapes offers a fresh and innovative approach to contemporary debates about landscape and the supernatural. Landscapes are often uncanny spaces embroiled in the past; associated with absence, memory and nostalgia. Yet experiences of haunting must in some way always belong to the present: they must be felt. This collection of essays opens up new and compelling areas of debate around the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape. Landscape studies, supernatural studies, haunting and memory are all rapidly growing fields of enquiry and this book synthesises ideas from several critical approaches – spectral, affective and spatial – to provide a new route into these subjects. Examining urban and rural landscapes, haunted domestic spaces, landscapes of trauma, and borderlands, this collection of essays is designed to cross disciplines and combine seemingly disparate academic approaches under the coherent locus of landscape and haunting. Presenting a timely intervention in some of the most pressing scholarly debates of our time, Haunted Landscapes offers an attractive array of essays that cover topics from Victorian times to the present.

Ghosts, spirits, and specters have played important roles in narratives throughout history and across nations and cultures. A watershed moment for this area of study was the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx in 1993, marking the inauguration of a "spectral turn" in cultural criticism. Gathering together the most compelling texts of the past twenty years, the editors transform the field of spectral studies with this first ever reader, employing the ghost as an analytical and methodological tool. The Spectralities Reader takes ghosts and haunting on their own terms, as wide-ranging phenomena that are not conscripted to a single aesthetic genre or style. Divided into six thematically discreet sections, the reader covers issues of philosophy, politics, media, spatiality, subject formation (gender, race and sexuality), and historiography. It anthologizes the previously published work of theoretical heavyweights from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben, alongside work by literary and cultural historians such as Jeffrey Sconce and Roger Luckhurst.

A cradle rocking itself in a dusty chamber; an echoing giggle from somewhere upstairs; the feeling of a small hand in yours in the wilderness of a misty moor. . . . From the haunting children of The Shining and The Grudge to Neil Gaiman's Coraline, the ghostly youth is still one of the most recognized and feared tropes of horror fiction and film. In this spine-tingling new collection, Jen Baker gathers the most chilling tales of hauntings by children, expertly paired with snippets of the folklore and urban legends which inspired them. Truly lost stories return for the first time since their original publication along with nail-biting encounters from masters of the ghost story such as Elizabeth Gaskell, M.R. James, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Exploring the pervasive presence of the Victorian past in contemporary culture, these essays use the trope of haunting and spectrality as a critical tool with which to consider neo-Victorian works, as well as our ongoing fascination with the Victorians, combining original readings of well-known novels with engaging analyses of lesser-known works.