Spectral America

by Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew

• ISBN13: 9780299199548
• ISBN10: 0299199541
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-01
• Publisher: Popular Pr of Bowling Green State

Summary

From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbusterThe Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans' conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today's resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social issues. Spectral Americaasserts that ghosts, whether in oral tradition, literature, or such modern forms as cinema have always been constructions embedded in specific historical contexts and invoked for explicit purposes, often political in nature. The essays address the role of "spectral evidence" during the Salem witch trials, the Puritan belief in good spirits, the convergence of American Spiritualism and technological development in the nineteenth century, the use of the supernatural as a tool of political critique in twentieth-century magic realism, and the "ghosting" of persons living with AIDS. They also discuss ghostly themes in the work of Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Gloria Naylor, and Stephen King.

Author Biography

Jeffrey Weinstock is assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University. He is the editor of The Pedagogical Wallpaper and coeditor, with Sarah Lynn Higley, of Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and The Blair Witch Controversies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: The Spectral Turn	3	(182)
JEFFREY ANDREW WEINSTOCK
1. Uncanny Afflictions: Spectral Evidence and the Puritan Crisis of Subjectivity
ALISON TRACY	18	(22)
2. Friendly Ghosts: Celebrations of the Living Dead in Early New England
JEFFREY HAMMOND	40	(17)
3. Can Such Things Be? Ambrose Bierce, the "Dead Mother," and Other American Traumas
ALLAN LLOYD SMITH	57	(21)
4. Living for the Other World: Sarah Orne Jewett as a Religious Writer
TERRY HELLER	78	(23)
5. The Politics of Heaven: The Ghost Dance, The Gates Ajar, and Captain Stormfield
JOHN J. KUCICHT	101	(23)
6. Technologies of Vision: Spiritualism and Science in Nineteenth-Century America
SHERI WEINSTEIN	124	(17)
7. Flight from Haunting: Psychogenic Fugue and Nineteenth-Century American Imagination	141	(16)
JESSICA CATHERINE LIEBERMAN
8. The Girl in the Library: Edith Wharton's "The Eyes" and American Gothic Traditions
CHARLES L. CROW	157	(12)
9. "Commitment to Doubleness": U.S. Literary Magic Realism and the Postmodern
ELIZABETH T. HAYES	169	(16)
10. Melodramatic Specters: Cinema and The Sixth Sense	185	(22)
KATHERINE A. FOWKES
11. Stephen King's Vintage Ghost-Cars: A Modern-Day Haunting
MARY FINDLEY	207	(14)
12. Ghosting HIV/AIDS: Haunting Words and Apparitional Bodies in Michelle Cliff's "Bodies of Water"	221	(23)
DIANA M. DAVIDSON
13. Salem's Ghosts and the Cultural Capital of Witches	244	(21)
BRIDGET M. MARSHALL
Contributors	265	(4)
Index	269