Henry James and the Supernatural [Hardcover]

This book is?a?collection of essays on ghostly fiction by Henry James. The contributors analyze James's use of the ghost story as a subgenre and the difficult theoretical issues that James's texts pose.Introduction: The Ghosts of Henry James; K.C.Reed Voices from Outside and Far Away; P.G.Beidler Style and Henry James's Ghosts; G.Zacharias Immensities of Perception and Yearning: The Haunting of Merton Densher; K.Boudreau Haunted Enclosures -?Ghostly Minds: The Private/Public Dilemma in the (Supernatural) Tales; A.Despotopoulou John Marcher's Superstitious Soul and the Uncanny Beast in the Jungle; K.Gentile 'Queer' Maud-Evelyn; K.Ohi 'Remember Bluebeard's Wife': Fairy Tale Residue and the Homosocial Bond in James's Ghost Stories; D.Long Hoeveler Uncanny Doublings in 'Owen Wingrave'; G.Buelens The Great Good Figure; S.Teahan

Using an exciting range of contemporary approaches, the contributors to this volume demonstrate convincingly that James s interest in the supernatural was central to his writing - to his acute sense of perceptual boundaries and of our relation to the physical world as well as to his lifelong investigation of the intricacies of memory and desire. For the Jamesian consciousness, the air of reality itself is ghostly. - T.J. Lustig, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, Keele University

A timely collection, Henry James and the Supernatural extends the discussion of James s engagement with spectrality beyond the familiar ground of The Turn of the Screw, beyond even the rich territory of James s other ghost stories. Invoking the uncanny under a variety of aspects - spatial, sacred, philosophical, Gothic, queer, rhetorical, among others - it stimulatingly shows the suggestiveness of the ghostly, richly bringing out the many ways in which James s profound challenge to usual categories and identities haunts our experience as readers. - Philip Horne, University College London and editor of Henry James: A Life in Letters