Focusing on the evolution of the American ghost story, this book explores its roots in Indigenous traditions, Puritan beliefs, and Enlightenment thought. It highlights the genre's peak during the nineteenth century and examines its ongoing influence in contemporary literature and visual culture, revealing how these narratives have adapted and persisted over time.
Travel in Gothic literature serves as a lens through which to explore deep-seated cultural anxieties surrounding fear, unfamiliar territories, and environmental shifts. The book examines how journeys in these narratives reflect themes of surveillance and the perception of the foreign, revealing the transformative impact of travel on both characters and readers. It delves into the interplay between movement and the psychological landscapes shaped by societal concerns.
Traces the history of the term lyric from its classical origins through the early modern, Romantic and Victorian periods and up to the twentieth-first century. This book demonstrates the influence of lyric on poetic practice, literature, music and other popular cultural forms. It is suitable for students of literature, music and cultural studies.
Exploring contemporary Irish poetry, this collection of essays examines the desiring body as both a cultural construct and an existential entity. By utilizing diverse literary and psychoanalytic theories, contributors analyze how poets like Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney portray the body as a source of empowerment and transformation. The essays reflect on material experience, drawing connections between gender, identity, and the body, and highlight the nuanced expressions of both male and female poets in the context of Irish culture and history.