Ghosts and Their Hosts (eBook)

The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America

Sladja Blažan (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
330 Seiten
University of Virginia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8139-5240-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Ghost stories as a window on the American settler psyche In this innovative book, Sladja Blaan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human labor exploitation. Blaan breaks with the long tradition of reading ghosts as harbingers of justice, arguing that early American ghost stories worked instead to suppress the presence of non-Europeans through fantasies of European transcultural incorporation. Images of sentient forests and nature possessed by spirits helped develop fixed racial, gendered, and sexualized categories, while authors used ghosts to affirm existing hierarchies and establish new ones. Focusing on the cultural exchanges between Germany, England, France, and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, Blaan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.12.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Writing the Early Americas
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: African American literature • American Studies • Ancestral spirits • Animation • apparitional tale • Charles Brockden Brown • cultural appropriation • Cultural Imaginary • Devil • EcoGothic • Emmanuel Swedenborg • England • exculpation narratives • feminist colonialism • France • free philosophy • Germany • ghost story • Gothic • Gothic novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe • haunted nature • human labor exploitation • Imagination • Immanuel Kant • Indigenous literature • Indigenous rites • Inter-subjectivity • Invisible World • Knowledge • land appropriation • Literary History • Lydia Maria Child • Magic • Modernity • Moral Theory • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Native American Literature • Nature • natureculture • New Materialism • Nineteenth-Century Literature • Occult • racial anxieties • racial hierarchy • reason • Relationality • sentient nature • settler colonialsm • slave cultures • slave narratives • spectral forests • Spectrality • spectral narrative • Subjectivity • Supernatural • the irrational • transatlatic • Transfiguration • transgenerational trauma • Violence • Washington Irving • West African animism
• ISBN-10: 0-8139-5240-9 / 0813952409
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8139-5240-6 / 9780813952406