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25 chilling short stories by outstanding female writers. Women have always written exceptional stories of horror and the supernatural. This anthology aims to showcase the very best of these, from Amelia B. Edwards's 'The Phantom Coach', published in 1864, through past luminaries such as Edith Wharton and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, to modern talents including Muriel Gray, Sarah Pinborough and Lilith Saintcrow. From tales of ghostly children to visitations by departed loved ones, and from heart-rending stories to the profoundly unsettling depiction of extreme malevolence, what each of these stories has in common is the effect of a slight chilling of the skin, a feeling of something not quite present, but nevertheless there. If anything, this showcase anthology proves that sometimes the female of the species can also be the most terrifying . . .
This book revives and revitalises the literary Gothic in the hands of contemporary women writers. It makes a scholarly, lively and convincing case that the Gothic makes horror respectable, and establishes contemporary women’s Gothic fictions in and against traditional Gothic. The book provides new, engaging perspectives on established contemporary women Gothic writers, with a particular focus on Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. It explores how the Gothic is malleable in their hands and is used to demythologise oppressions based on difference in gender and ethnicity. The study presents new Gothic work and new nuances, critiques of dangerous complacency and radical questionings of what is safe and conformist in works as diverse as Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) and A Girl Walks Home Alone (Ana Lily Amirpur), as well as by Anne Rice and Poppy Brite. It also introduces and critically explores postcolonial, vampire and neohistorical Gothic and women’s ghost stories.
Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
The author of The War Between the Tates and the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs now brings her irresistible wit to the ghost story. In nine spooky tales, Alison Lurie writes of women haunted by ghosts both literal and metaphorical: A woman about to marry Mr. Right is visited by the spirit of his first wife; a dead fiancé haunts a foreign service officer every time she has an intimate moment with another man; the ghost of a girl in a Halloween costume disconcerts the perfect housewife. A secretary on a diet begins to see obese people everywhere she looks; a self-conscious poet is shadowed by her intrusive doppelganger; and a capricious, malevolent spirit seems to have inhabited an acquisitive matron’s prized piece of furniture. Delightfully strange and beautifully told, these nine tales show Alison Lurie at her luminous best.
Gives voice to the many divergent--and equally passionate--points of view that surround ghosts. After a decade of research, the authors have produced a work of surprising substance and depth. Enter Cape Cod's historic, soulful homes--such as the nationally-renowned cover image of Wendell Minor--and discover a world in which the past is very much alive. Original.
In this "delightfully uncanny" collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales (The New York Times Book Review), humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services—from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime. A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive “feminine” passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company. With Where the Wild Ladies Are, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales—shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells—and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.
This book offers new insights on socially and culturally engaged Gothic ghost stories by twentieth century and contemporary female writers; including Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, Susan Hill, Catherine Lim, Kate Mosse, Daphne du Maurier, Helen Dunmore, Michele Roberts, and Zheng Cho. Through the ghostly body, possessions and visitations, women’s ghost stories expose links between the political and personal, genocides and domestic tyrannies, providing unceasing reminders of violence and violations. Women, like ghosts, have historically lurked in the background, incarcerated in domestic spaces and roles by familial and hereditary norms. They have been disenfranchised legally and politically, sold on dreams of romance and domesticity. Like unquiet spirits that cannot be silenced, women’s ghost stories speak the unspeakable, revealing these contradictions and oppressions. Wisker’s book demonstrates that in terms of women’s ghost stories, there is much to point the spectral finger at and much to speak out about.
This book explores Victorian and modernist haunted houses in female-authored ghost stories as representations of the architectural uncanny. It reconsiders the gendering of the supernatural in terms of unease, denial, disorientation, confinement and claustrophobia within domestic space. Drawing on spatial theory by Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre and Elizabeth Grosz, it analyses the reoccupation and appropriation of space by ghosts, women and servants as a means of addressing the opposition between the past and modernity. The chapters consider a range of haunted spaces, including ancestral mansions, ghostly gardens, suburban villas, Italian churches and houses subject to demolition and ruin. The ghost stories are read in the light of women’s non-fictional writing on architecture, travel, interior design, sacred space, technology, the ideal home and the servant problem. Women writers discussed include Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, May Sinclair and Elizabeth Bowen. This book will appeal to students and researchers in the ghost story, Female Gothic and Victorian and modernist women’s writing, as well as general readers with an interest in the supernatural.
Blue Light of the Screen is a memoir about the author's obsession with horror and the supernatural. Blue Light of the Screen is about what it means to be afraid -- about immersion, superstition, delusion, and the things that keep us up at night. A creative-critical memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre, Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism of horror within a larger personal story of growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts. As Cronin writes, she positions herself as a protagonist who is haunted by what she watches and reads, like an antiquarian in an M.R. James ghost story whose sense of reality unravels through her study of arcane texts and cursed archives. In this way, Blue Light of the Screen tells the story of the author's conversion from skepticism to faith in the supernatural. Part memoir, part ghost story, and part critical theory, Blue Light of the Screen is not just a book about horror, but a work of horror itself.
Rooted in place, slipping between worlds - a rich collection of unnerving ghosts and sinister histories. 'An impressive line-up of established and emerging names.' The Sunday Times 'These eerie, unsettling stories are guaranteed to send shivers down your spine.' Daily Express Eight authors were given the freedom of their chosen English Heritage site, from medieval castles to a Cold War nuclear bunker. Immersed in the past and chilled by rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories. 'Subtly evocative of human relations loss, grief, or the fear of loneliness.' TLS 'A satisfying and spooky read.' Sun Also includes a gazetteer of English Heritage properties which are said to be haunted.