New Directions in the Ghost Story, Volume I

“New Directions in the Ghost Story is the most comprehensive scholarly account of this mercurial, ever-popular literary genre to date. Marshalling a broad range of new and established critical voices, across the series the editors have assembled path-breaking essays that traverse representational forms, historical periods and spatial geographies alike, revealing in each instance the spectre’s uncanny habit of turning up when and where it is least expected.” (Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

“Breathing new life into debates about spectrality, this carefully curated collection interrogates the tricky terminologies and vexed chronologies of the ghost story form. It uncovers the often surprising histories and reimaginings of a mode whose imagery, aesthetics, geography and sonic threats are endlessly reinvented for changing times and global markets. New Directions in the Ghost Story diverts us from the stories we know, taking in folkloric witches and werewolves, Yakshi and yokai, more-than-human entities, as well as hauntings across a range of media forms: horror cinema, magazine illustration, audio drama, Gothic TV, music albums and ballet. The new frameworks held out by this innovative collection herald traditions yet to come.” (Dr Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

“Whether providing new approaches to familiar material, or opening up new avenues of the ghostly, New Directions in the Ghost Story presents new and refreshing insights into the spectral and its social and cultural roles, from non-human spectres, through haunted media, ancient myth to the terror of the anthropocene.” (Dr Derek Johnston, Queen’s University Belfast, author of “Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween”)

This book provides an exciting and informed overview of new, emerging, and radical approaches to the long ghost story tradition. Interrogating established canons and recurring modes of ghost story analysis, New Directions explores where academic criticism of the genre stands today, and where it might be heading next. The first substantial project of its kind in the field, this two-volume set consists of thirty-three essays presented across two volumes, and presents fresh explorations of the forms, histories, meanings, and media of the ghost story. Volume 1 is comprised of seventeen chapters organised around two areas of enquiries: “Part I: Tradition, Theory and Genre” and “Part II: Space, Place, and the Ecospectral”.

Henry Bartholomew is a Lecturer at the Global Banking School, Birmingham. His work explores the ghost story, the Gothic, and weird fiction, and he has edited three story anthologies in these areas. His latest project is a special issue of Gothic Studies on the author Algernon Blackwood.

Joan Passey is a Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She specialises in representations of coasts and seascapes in literature and culture, especially the Gothic. She regularly appears on BBC Radio 3 and has edited anthologies with the British Library.

Jen Baker is a lecturer in Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the editor of Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (British Library, 2021). She is working on her first monograph on haunting expression and spectral embodiments of child death in the long nineteenth century.