American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age - (Palgrave Gothic) by D Downey (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Dara Downey explores how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales that range from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, she offers a new perspective on an old genre. Rather than seeing the spectres that stalk the pages of women's writing in Gilded-Age America as mere hallucinations or signs of mental disturbance, Downey examines the unusual motif of haunted houses without ghosts. Rarely appearing as ghosts, the dead women in the tales studied here hide away in the patters of furniture and wallpaper, offering a radical critique of the male gaze that reduced female bodies to alluring objects. Covering murderous nightcaps, haunted boarding houses and spectral china closets, it allows the object matter of the ghost story to, almost literally, come out of the closet"--

Book Synopsis

This book shows just how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, it offers a new perspective on an old genre.

Review Quotes

"Downey's readings would be valuable for any instructor or student studying the ghost story, American gothic, or gender in the Gilded Age. Her clear discussions of literary and historical context make the book accessible and engaging for advanced and undergraduate scholars alike, and her productive use of repetition and a reflective format make it useful as a whole or in teachable excerpts." (Laura R. Kremmel, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 15, 2016)

With references from Poe to Marx to Derrida, this volume is an intriguing and often fascinating mixture of historical and socio-cultural analysis and literary criticism. Rich in ideas that frequently overlap, contradict or complement each other - often exposing the slippery nature of notions themselves - Dara Downey's work eschews the usual psychoanalytical readings of ghost story motifs and offers fresh perspectives. Not just for academics, this book will prove useful to readers wishing to explore the causes and contexts of American ghost stories of the Gilded Age. - The Green Book, (2015) JV

'A compelling volume that powerfully challenges the Western canon of Memory Studies to define a new age of cultural memory in the East.' - Andrew Hoskins

About the Author

Anglophone postcolonial studies has been characterized by its secular nature. Yet as the first generation of scholars grapples with mortality, a yearning for spiritual meaning is emerging in many texts. This study synthesizes the sacred language used in these texts with critical theory in order to create a holistic frame for interpretive analysis.