Ghosts, Stories and Histories

This collection combines academic reflections on typical ghost stories from the seventeenth century to our current ghosts in the machine. All primary texts are associated with Anglo-American discourses, some of which originate in the Chinese or African traditions as in the case of the American appropriation of Zhang Yimou’s adaptation of Raise the Red Lantern. The focus on the function and the representation of the ghostly figure allows such different narratives as Daniel Defoe’s “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal” (1705), one of the first modern ghost stories, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a psychological exploration of a mother-daughter relationship after the experience of slavery, to appear next to each other. This variety demonstrates that spectral vocabulary—which so far mainly circulated in marginalized spheres such as women’s issues, so-called ethnic topics, and supernatural literature—is finally finding its place in cultural theory and literary studies.