Abstract

Haunted Landscapes offers a fresh and innovative approach to contemporary debates about landscape and the supernatural. Landscapes are often uncanny spaces embroiled in the past; associated with absence, memory and nostalgia. Yet experiences of haunting must in some way always belong to the present: they must be felt. This collection of essays opens up new and compelling areas of debate around the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape. Landscape studies, supernatural studies, haunting and memory are all rapidly growing fields of enquiry and this book synthesises ideas from several critical approaches – spectral, affective and spatial – to provide a new route into these subjects. Examining urban and rural landscapes, haunted domestic spaces, landscapes of trauma, and borderlands, this collection of essays is designed to cross disciplines and combine seemingly disparate academic approaches under the coherent locus of landscape and haunting. Presenting a timely intervention in some of the most pressing scholarly debates of our time, Haunted Landscapes offers an attractive array of essays that cover topics from Victorian times to the present.
A dizzying array of scholarship which explores concepts of the landscape and haunting in a variety of contexts – literature, film, folklore, psycho-geography and landscape studies – which demands we rethink what “haunted landscapes” are.
Mikel Koven, Senior Lecturer, University of Worcester, UK
Haunted Landscapes offers an innovative and wide-ranging account of the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape. … The value of this collection resides in its interdisciplinary scope. … Haunted Landscapes represents a major and timely achievement that reveals the complexity of the interaction between the landscape and the human through hauntings that range from traditionally ‘supernatural’ to Timothy Morton’s notion of the ‘super natural’ or ‘extra Nature’ (The Ecological Thought, 2010, 45). In doing so, the collection offers an important contribution to the fields of ecocriticism and ecogothic that will hold considerable appeal for ecocritical scholars.
Together, the essays in this volume offer a fascinating account of the relationship between our ideas of ghosts and our ideas of landscape. They remind us, usefully, of the importance of the unseen and unknown in the process of seeing, knowing and reading place and space.
Adeline Johns-Putra, Reader in English Literature, University of Surrey
Expanding ‘natural’ to ‘supernatural’, this innovative collection demonstrates the ecological significance of haunting, ghosts, and the ‘spectral’. Ranging from Heidegger to Sebald, Bram Stoker to Walter Scott, Coraline to Guillermo del Toro, these essays illustrate that the places we love, loathe, idealise or fear get under our skin, and haunt us with our eternal connection to nature.
John Parham, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Worcester
Ruth Heholt is a Senior Lecturer in English at Falmouth University, UK
Niamh Downing is a Senior Lecturer in English at Falmouth University, UK