Popular Ghosts

Esther Peeren is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin, queer television, translation theory and the chronotopic dimension of diaspora. Her first book, entitled Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond appeared in 2007 with Stanford University Press and she also co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities (Rodopi, 2007). Currently, she is developing a project on spectrality in contemporary literature, television and film. Maria del Pilar Blanco is Lecturer in Latin American Studies at University College London. She has published on the haunted landscapes of the Americas, and is currently working on her manuscript titled Ghost-watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination, which has been invited by Fordham University Press. She is beginning work on a project dealing with the interface between scientific invention and poetic inventio in the works of fin-de-siecle Spanish American authors.

Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren are to be congratulated for bringing together such an exciting set of essays. The comparative approach uniquely pulls together studies from all corners of the world, emphasizing cultural differences in narratives of haunting whilst maintaining a strong conceptual coherence. Whether looking at popular fiction, canonical literature, film, TV or folklore, they rightly follow the imperative to historicise and contextualise the ghost. What results is a fascinating series of encounters that speaks urgently to our contemporary spooked state of being.   --Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College

• Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, "Introduction"; I. Genealogies of the Ghost; II. Spectral Politics of the Contemporary; III. Chasing Ghosts In(to) the 21st Century; IV. Other Ghostly Spheres; V. Ambient Ghosts: Spectral Images, Sounds, and Bodies; Selected Bibliography; Notes on Contributors; Index.