Academic literature on the topic 'English Ghost stories'

For centuries, authors of literary works have sought to bewitch and enchant readers with accounts of supernatural elements such as monsters, spirits and ghosts. Ghosts especially are often depicted as representations of evil and the polar opposite of mankind. In Hanna Alkaf’s The Girl and The Ghost (2020) the adolescent protagonist, Suraya, develops an unusual bond with a ghost, Pink. This is indeed refreshing, considering the human-ghost relationship in the local literary scene is often represented as antagonistic, opposing forces, resulting in ghosts being portrayed as evil, vengeful creatures set to taunt, haunt and wreck humans’ lives. Critical examination of the human-ghost bond in the local literary-critical practice is lacking. This research aims to fill this gap by examining the human-ghost bond in The Girl and The Ghost and how this bond contributes to the (human) protagonist’s personal development. In this paper, The Girl and The Ghost is read using John Bowlby’s theory of attachment due to its robust approach to understanding human beings' emotional bond, or attachment, with their attachment figures. We argue the human-ghost bond in The Girl and The Ghost sets the novel apart from other local ghost stories filled with wicked, destructive ghosts. The findings suggest other possibilities of attachment figures when the relationship between a mother and child grows apart. The unusual but enduring relationship between Suraya and Pink demonstrates that a child’s secure attachment need not be limited to motherly figures.
 Keywords: Malaysian literature in english, the girl and the ghost, hanna alkaf, ghost tales, attachment theory

ABSTRACT The twelve ghost stories written by a monk at Byland Abbey, North Yorkshire, around 1400 CE have received extensive comment by scholars of medieval ghost stories and the supernatural. Public interpretation of the site, which has been in State care since 1921, has largely focused on the acknowledged importance of Byland's buildings in the development of Cistercian architecture in the British Isles in the late twelfth century. With a strong architectural focus, Byland's English Heritage guidebook makes no mention of the stories or indeed medieval beliefs about death, the afterlife, and the supernatural. This article aims to demonstrate that the ghost stories, together with the architectural, artifactual, and documentary evidence pertaining to monastic beliefs and observance about death, burial, and spiritual salvation, are in fact key to the interpretation of Byland—indeed, to all medieval monasteries—for twenty-first-century visitors.

The article describes how gender and national aspects are constructed in late 19th–early 20th century British ghost stories. Both categories are seen within the context of the fearful Other so characteristic of the genre: deviations from the ideal of healthy British masculinity are perceived as potentially dangerous. It can be expressed as appearance of feminine or juvenile features gravitating towards heathen cults, and here gender is combined with the national: often a portion of non-British blood (e.g. Jewish or Italian) influences the choice of the particular cult and the way the protagonist’s appearance and manners change in the course of the narrative. All these phenomena are often complemented with the presence of animalistic features in the character, even if only metaphorically: any decline from masculinity and Christianity is perceived as a partial loss of humanity. Here, the influence of theories by Ch. Lombroso, M. Nordau, J. Fraser etc. is evident. But the authors of high quality stories (J. Buchan, A, Conan Doyle, E. F. Benson) do not preach these ideas straightforwarldly, they create original texts with quite ambivalent treatment of the topics discussed.

The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” of the Exeter Book reveals a long process of creating intelligibility and order out of a complicated and obscure manuscript context. Understanding this history of reception allows us to see the influence of Old English poetry on modern creative medievalism, including the unexpected influence of medieval “enigmatic” poetry on the modern genre of supernatural fiction. Specifically, it is argued that the scholarly reception of folios 122v–123v of the Exeter Anthology was instrumental in inspiring one of the acknowledged classic ghost stories of the twentieth century, M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.

Lal Behari Dey was a Bengali Indian. He was journalist and converted to Christianity. After his conversion he became a missionary. He wrote profoundly in English and edited several magazines. This paper discusses Lal Behari Dey’s collection of Bengali folktales titled Folk Tales of Bengal. Four tales are chosen to be analyzed. They are The Indigent Brahman, The Ghost Brahman, A Ghostly Wife and The Story Of A Brahmadaitya. These tales are analysed using Vladimir Propp’s theory of the function of the dramatic personae. The similarities between the stories will also be determined in this reading of the folktales.

This paper explores contemporary Sri Lankan fiction as expressions and experiments in postcolonial EcoGothic writing by highlighting an intense relationship between ecology and place. By examining the novels of three contemporary Sri Lankan writers – Roma Tearne’s Mosquito, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, and Patricia Weerakoon’s Empire’s Children, the article examines how certain landscape tropes such as the sea, the forest, ruins, caves, and tea plantations are shaped by the writers as gothic spaces to share their ecological concerns. The eerie plantations in Empire’s Children and the fecund forest, groves and the sea in Mosquito, and the caves and mass graves in Anil’s Ghosts allude to traumas related to postcoloniality, war, and military territorialization. Building upon theories of landscape, ecocriticism, and more specifically, the EcoGothic, the article draws upon works by Sharae Deckard and others to suggest how in these novels, the landscape is not just a setting for the stories but palimpsests of multiple histories of violence on both the people and the environment. The article examines how the novel enacts violence and spatial disorientation, closely connected with the gothic genre, suggesting Anglophone contemporary Sri Lankan fiction writers’ recurrent exploration of gothic and ecology in their works.

English novelist and short story writer, Toby Litt is the author of the novels Beatniks: An English Road Movie (1997), Corpsing (2000), Deadkidsongs (2001), Finding Myself (2003), Ghost Story (2004), Hospital (2007), I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay (2008), Journey into Space (2009), and King Death (2010). He is also known for his collections of short stories Adventures in Capitalism (1996) and Exhibitionism (2002). Toby Litt was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 “Best of Young British Novelists” in 2003. He is an authorised voice among young writers deconstructing contemporary consumer society. In this interview, held at the University of Almería during the 34th AEDEAN Conference (11-13 November 2010), he provides an assessment of modern politics, shares his ideas concerning the recent political affairs in the UK, such as the ideological modernisation during the previous New Labour years or the latest social changes in Britain, and he finally examines the position of writers and intellectuals as regards to power and their political commitment.

AbstractIn South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological partitions into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that theDictionary of South African English on Historical Principlesreveals that in South African English the wordmaiddenotes both “black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary art about domestic labor by Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In their art, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction, including Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collectionLiving, Loving and Lying Awake at Night(1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novelPlaying in the Light(2006), in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.

AbstractThis article looks at the fate of Balthasar Bekker's De Betoverde Weereld in England. The famous work opposing the earthly activity of evil spirits, rejecting the reality of witchcraft, and debunking spirit stories by suggesting natural causes for the supposed supernatural events, was published in Amsterdam (following a rowe with the original Leeuwarden publisher) by Anthony van Dale in 1692–1693 and caused an intense controversy. Bekker was a strict monotheist unwilling to hand over any of God's power to evil spirits or the Devil, an advocate of the accomodationist school of Scriptural interpretation that had landed Galileo in jail in 1633, a serious student of spirit “superstition” with works such as those of Reginald Scot, Abraham Paling, and Anthony van Dale in his library. And he was a Cartesian: he owned Clauberg, Heereboord, Sylvain-Regis, etc. His opponents said that if one did not believe in evil spirits one could not believe in God. Bekker's book went through several Dutch printings, was right away translated into French and German, stirring reaction in those countries (the new book by Nooijen, Unserm Großen Bekker ein Denkmahl? looks at the German reaction). In England plans were afoot to translate the Betoverde Weereld by 1694, and Book I was translated and published. But that was all that got done. The highly controversial Book II and the final two books remained untranslated and unpublished. Why? Not for a lack of interest in evil spirits in England: witness the works of Glanvill, Henry More, George Sinclair, John Webster, and many others. Ghost stories were not lacking—just see the “Devil of Tedworth” and “Beckington Witch” stories. I argue the failure was a result of the vicissitudes of the London publishing industry, especially the relatively new periodical publishing, and of the eccentric, intellectual, but unfocussed general publisher John Dunton, who ruined himself and the Bekker project with his poor business sense (his wife ran the shop for him and when she died he was lost) which led him to travel to Dublin and Boston in search of publishable manuscripts (even on spirits!) instead of allowing him to concentrate his resources on Bekker. As a result, Bekker's work remained little known in the English-speaking world and its significance was almost totally overshadowed by the work of Locke. Would Daniel van Dalen, Jan ten Hoorn, or Willem Blaeu have made the same mistake? Also, Dunton put a goodly amount of his resources into the risky new periodical market and lost money that could have financed publication of the last three books of De Betoverde Weereld. Just because of the controversial nature of what he said, Bekker deserved better in England.

A story titled “The Impressionists”that was published in 1897 should have something to say about art, but does it? The sixth installment in Rudyard Kipling'sStalky & Co.series, “The Impressionists” follows the antics of M'Turk, Stalky, and Beetle, three cunning boys at a dreary English military preparatory school. Suspecting these boys of cheating on their schoolwork, housemaster Mr. Prout turns them out of their private study into the main house dormitory. For revenge, and hoping to win back their room, Stalky & Co. becomeagents provocateurs. They start a fight in their house and manage to involve the other housemasters’ houses: “Under cover of the confusion the three escaped to the corridor, whence they called in and sent up passers-by to the fray. ‘Rescue, King's! King's! King's! Number Twelve form-room! Rescue, Prout's – Prout's! Rescue, Macrea's! Rescue, Hartopp's!’” (102). The three boys then allow Mr. Prout to overhear a conversation that makes money-lending seem common practice in the houses: “‘Where's that shillin’ you owe me?’ said Beetle suddenly. Stalky could not see Prout behind him, but returned the lead without a quaver. ‘I only owed you ninepence, you old usurer’” (103). Stalky & Co. rile up the other boys by telling ghost stories and spreading slanderous ditties; they turn the house against the prefects and undermine Mr. Prout's authority; and in the end they win back their room, but they are also found out by the headmaster, who mixes corporeal punishment with his admonishments: “There is a limit – one finds it by experience, Beetle – beyond which it is never safe to pursue private vendettas, because – don't move – sooner or later one comes – into collision with the – higher authority, who has studied the animal.Et ego– M'Turk, please –in Arcadia vixi” (117). The boys take the headmaster's attentions as a compliment, and they take his advice. Never again do they stake the school's peace in the pursuit of their own ends.