Hauntology
Ghosts of Futures Past
by Merlin Coverley
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Pub Date 1 Mar 2021 | Archive Date 22 Oct 2020
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Description
Ghosts and specters, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean?
This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artifacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780857304193 |
| PRICE | US$27.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 224 |
Links
Featured Reviews
J. Aislynn d, Reviewer
This book wasn't what I expected from reading the description. I was expecting a look at actual ghost stories and tales of haunting, and how the spectral influences the corporeal. Instead, I found myself introduced to a fascinating philosophy that I was wholly unfamiliar with. This notion of how the past 'haunts' the present resonated with me. Concepts such nostalgia, retromania, cyclical history and more gave me much to ponder, leading to it taking much longer to finish reading than it might otherwise have.
This seemed eerily prescient given current goings on both world-wide, and within my birth country. The past is certainly haunting us right now as history has cycled around, bringing situations we should have been prepared for/ could have avoided. A global pandemic and the rise of the Tangerine Tyrant are events repeating themselves, echoing into the present, yet no-one seemed prepared at all. I wonder- will we ever learn from the dead past or will it always haunt us?
****Many thanks to Netgalley and Oldcastle Books for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
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