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Examines the work of contemporary American authors who draw on the gothic tradition in their fiction
 
In Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions, Arthur Redding argues that ghosts serve as lasting witnesses to the legacies of slaves and indigenous peoples whose stories were lost in the remembrance or mistranslation of history.
 
Authors such as Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko deploy the ghost as a means of reconciling their own violently repressed heritage with their identity as modern Americans. And just as our ancestors were haunted by ghosts of the past, today their descendants are haunted by ghosts of contemporary crises: urban violence, racial hatred, and even terrorism. In other cases that Redding studies—such as James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen and Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child—gothic writers address similar crises to challenge traditional American claims of innocence and justice.
 

A detailed study of Victorian supernaturalism in book and magazine illustrations and cartoons

Illustrating the Victorian Supernatural explores written and visual texts through which the original Victorian readership encountered and navigated their experience of supernaturalism. Looking across the nineteenth century, Simon Cooke investigates illustrative responses to well-known texts by writers such as Charles Dickens and Henry James while also examining responses to less familiar ghost stories by female authors such as M. E. Braddon and Amelia Edwards. The mix of familiar and unfamiliar carries forward into the selection of artists, both those in the mainstream—John Leech, George Cruikshank, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais—and others whose names are lost to modern readers and whose work deserves to be better known.

The study addresses two main questions: how illustration responded to key literary texts and how graphic designs related to contemporary contexts of race, gender, and class and to the workings of the supernatural itself. The first chapter focuses on satirical writings about ghosts and ghostliness and the various ways illustrators depicted that mockery. Chapter 2 traces artistic responses to Dickens’s writing of the supernatural as a mode of psychological investigation. Chapter 3 looks at class and gender and the problematic practice of male artists illustrating female-authored ghost stories. The fourth chapter examines satirical cartoons’ deployment of supernatural imagery to anatomize issues of imperialism and race. Finally, chapter 5 examines how neo-Victorian artists have revisited the classic texts and taken up the themes established by their forebears.

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renée L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.