The Victorian Ghost Story - (Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic) by Andrew Smith (Hardcover)

About the Book

The most thorough analysis of the Victorian ghost story to date.

Book Synopsis

The Victorian Ghost Story: An Edinburgh Companion invites readers to interrogate the multi-layered, multi-vocal conversations that occur within the Victorian ghost story. Its twenty-four chapters provide a historical overview of the development of the ghost story and explore it in light of the 'new' contexts of the period, including mechanisation, imperialism and changes to the economy. As a much-needed survey of critical work on the ghost story, it features detailed analysis of major Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell and Henry James, and it examines the places haunted by Victorian ghosts: haunted houses but also haunted museums, fells, pyramids and seascapes. By engaging with ecocriticism, race, colonialism, class and gender, this interdisciplinary Companion constitutes a significant scholarly contribution to the Victorian ghost story and how it relates to a broader Gothic tradition.

Review Quotes

Charles Dickens famously complained that "ghosts...'walk' in a beaten track". This fascinating collection of specially commissioned essays, by specialists in the field, proves conclusively that in Victorian fiction ghosts spent most of their time off the beaten track, making the invisible visible and in the process often challenging the repressions of the status quo. The Victorian Ghost Story is bound to haunt its readers for a long time to come.--Sir Christopher Frayling, Royal College of Art