Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History

What do they want, the ghosts that even in the age of science still haunt our storytelling? Taking Shakespeare's Ghost in Hamlet as a turning point in the history of the genre, Catherine Belsey uncovers the ancient sources the play relies on to trace Gothic writing and tales of the uncanny up to the present, from Homer and the Icelandic Sagas to Lincoln in the Bardo. Follow this vividly recounted ghostly trail through accredited records of apparitions and fiction by such writers as Ann Radcliffe, Washington Irving, Emily Bront , Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, M. R. James and Susan Hill. In recent blockbusting movies, too, ghost stories bring us fragments of news from the unknown.