The Spectral Metaphor

The Spectral Metaphor
Author: E. Peeren
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2014-01-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113737585X

What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects – migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons – are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this figuration can signify both dispossession and empowerment or agency.

The Spectral Metaphor

The Spectral Metaphor
Author: E. Peeren
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2014-01-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113737585X

What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects – migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons – are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this figuration can signify both dispossession and empowerment or agency.

A Theory of Spectral Rhetoric

A Theory of Spectral Rhetoric
Author: Seth Pierce
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2021-08-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030696790

This book synthesizes Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and spectrality with affect theory, in order to create a rhetorical framework analyzing the felt absences and hauntings of written and oral texts. The book opens with a history of hauntology, spectrality, and affect theory and how each of those ideas have been applied. The book then moves into discussing the unique elements of the rhetorical framework known as the rhetorrectional situation. Three case studies taken from the Christian tradition, serve to demonstrate how spectral rhetoric works. The first is fictional, C.S. Lewis ’The Great Divorce. The second is non-fiction, Tim Jennings ’The God Shaped Brain. The final one is taken from homiletics, Bishop Michael Curry’s royal wedding 2018 sermon. After the case studies conclusion offers the reader a summary and ideas future applications for spectral rhetoric.

Narrating the Global Financial Crisis

Narrating the Global Financial Crisis
Author: Miriam Meissner
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-05-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319454110

This book analyzes how the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed in contemporary popular culture, using examples from film, literature and photography. In particular, the book explores why particular urban spaces, infrastructures and aesthetics – such as skyline shots in the opening credits of financial crisis films – recur in contemporary crisis narratives. Why are cities and finance connected in the cultural imaginary? Which ideologies do urban crisis imaginaries communicate? How do these imaginaries relate to the notion of crisis? To consider these questions, the book reads crisis narratives through the lens of myth. It combines perspectives from cultural, media and communication studies, anthropology, philosophy, geography and political economy to argue that the concept of myth can offer new and nuanced insights into the structure and politics of popular financial crisis imaginaries. In so doing, the book also asks if, how and under what conditions urban crisis imaginaries open up or foreclose systematic and political understandings of the Global Financial Crisis as a symptom of the broader process of financialization.

Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales

Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales
Author: Joan Passey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2024-02-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350361127

The first dedicated exploration of the short fiction of Shirley Jackson for three decades, this volume takes an in-depth look at the themes and legacies of her 200-plus short stories. Recognized as the mother of contemporary horror, scholars from across the globe, and from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds, dig into the lasting impact of her work in light of its increasing relevance to contemporary critical preoccupations and the re-release of Jackson's work in 2016. Offering new methodologies to study her work, this volume calls upon ideas of intertextuality, ecocriticism and psychoanalysis to examine a broad range of themes from national identity, race, gender and class to domesticity, the occult, selfhood and mental illness. With consideration of her blockbuster works alongside later works that received much less critical attention, Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales promises a rich and dynamic expansion on previous scholarship of Jackson's oeuvre, both bringing her writing into the contemporary conversation, and ensuring her place in the canon of Horror fiction.

Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Sie

Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Sie
Author: Jane Ford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2015-10-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317576594

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of ‘needs’ to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet. The collection builds on recent critical developments in fin-de-siècle literature (including major interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies) and asks, for instance, how did late nineteenth-century writing schematise the libidinal and somatic dimensions of economic exchange? How might we define the relationship between eroticism and the formal economies of literary production/performance? And what relation exists between advertising/consumer culture and (dissident) sexuality in fin-de-siecle literary discourses? This book marks an important contribution to 19th-Century and Victorian literary studies, and enhances the field of fin-de-siècle studies more generally.

The Perturbed Self

The Perturbed Self
Author: Mengxing Fu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000431312

By comparison of late nineteenth-century ghost stories between China and Britain, this monograph traces the entangled dynamics between ghost story writing, history-making, and the moulding of a gendered self. Associated with times of anxiety, groups under marginalisation, and tensions with orthodox narratives, ghost stories from two distinguished literary traditions are explored through the writings and lives of four innovative writers of this period, namely Xuan Ding (宣鼎) and Wang Tao (王韬) in China and Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit in Britain. Through this cross-cultural investigation, the book illuminates how a gendered self is constructed in each culture and what cultural baggage and assets are brought into this construction. It also ventures to sketch a common poetics underlying a "literature of the anomaly" that can be both destabilising and constructive, subversive, and coercive. This book will be welcomed by the Gothic studies community, as well as scholars working in the fields of women’s writing, nineteenth-century British literature, and Chinese literature.

Spectral Memories of Post-crash Iceland

Spectral Memories of Post-crash Iceland
Author: Vera Knútsdóttir
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2023-12-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004685510

How does the spectre appear in Icelandic literature and visual art created in the aftermath of the economic crash in Iceland in 2008? Why does it emerge at that specific point in time and what can it tell us about repressed collective memories in Iceland? The book explores how the crash becomes an implicit background setting in novels that address the silences and gaps of the family archive, and how crime fiction employs generic features of horror to explicitly tackle the ghosts residing in the lost homes of the financial crash. Spectral space is an apparent theme of cultural memories produced in times of crisis, and the book explores how this is made apparent in visual art of the period.

The Spectralities Reader

The Spectralities Reader
Author: Maria del Pilar Blanco
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 582
Release: 2013-08-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1441124780

Ghosts, spirits, and specters have played important roles in narratives throughout history and across nations and cultures. A watershed moment for this area of study was the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx in 1993, marking the inauguration of a "spectral turn" in cultural criticism. Gathering together the most compelling texts of the past twenty years, the editors transform the field of spectral studies with this first ever reader, employing the ghost as an analytical and methodological tool. The Spectralities Reader takes ghosts and haunting on their own terms, as wide-ranging phenomena that are not conscripted to a single aesthetic genre or style. Divided into six thematically discreet sections, the reader covers issues of philosophy, politics, media, spatiality, subject formation (gender, race and sexuality), and historiography. It anthologizes the previously published work of theoretical heavyweights from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben, alongside work by literary and cultural historians such as Jeffrey Sconce and Roger Luckhurst.