Tales of the Troubled Dead

Tales of the Troubled Dead Description

Have the walking dead anything to tell us that might matter to the modern world? Catherine Belsey suggests that ghost stories continue to register the strangeness that surrounds the everyday, bringing fragments of news from the unknown that speak to our nameless anxieties. Taking Hamlet as a turning point in the history of ghost stories, Belsey uncovers the traditional tales the play draws on, before considering its influence on later Gothic fiction up to the present day. She also discusses whether fictional female revenants were more benign or deadlier, while showing how storytelling goes about exciting the desire of the reader. The book considers a range of ghost stories from Homer and the Icelandic sagas to Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and beyond, including works by M. G. Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, M. R. James, Edith Wharton, Ambrose Bierce, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Susan Hill and many others familiar to devotees of the genre.