The Western conception of haunting in literature typically evokes images of ghosts and other spirits entering our physical plane as a sign of some spiritual or emotional disruption. However, in a marked difference, African, African American and Caribbean cultures and spiritual traditions conceive of hauntings, both ancestral and otherwise, as part of their historical and contemporary epistemology. This essay considers hauntings in the works of African, African American, and Caribbean literature as serving as a bulwark against modernity with its attendant racism, capital exploitation and environmental devastation for colonised people and their descendants in the modern world. Examining short stories by Chinua Achebe, Henry Dumas, and Shani Mootoo demonstrates the multiple ways that African-based spiritual traditions decenter traditional western notions of haunting while simultaneously demonstrating the potential corrective possibilities of these traditions in a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly pernicious world for colonised peoples.

This chapter engages with the world of ghosts and spirits (guishen 鬼神) in the classical Chinese tradition. While there has been agreement about the existence of ghosts, their status and the duties of currently living humans to them is all but clear. We argue that a Confucian innovation consists in acknowledging the existence of the spirit world in an “as if” mode. In this conception, humans share obligations of respect while they are well advised to practice attentive distancing to these beings. The mechanisms governing a haunted cosmos are ultimately beyond human comprehension. Ghosts are stand-ins and correctives who reveal the limits of human control and comprehension. We conclude by discussing the potential contributions of this Confucian conception of ghosts and spirits to contemporary debates on intergenerational justice.

This chapter provides a cultural history of the wicked advocate from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection reflect deep-rooted problems in the history of local administration. It starts with monasteries’ miracle stories about advocates suffering in death as punishment for their crimes in this life. It then turns to the Swiss legend of William Tell and analyzes the earliest versions of the legend in order to demonstrate that Tell’s rival, the wicked advocate Gessler, abused his position in ways similar to those of other advocates. This chapter then discusses Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell to show that concerns about corrupt practices of justice and protection extended into the early nineteenth century. Local legends about bad advocates, some of them preserved today on the Internet, provide additional evidence for the enduring value of stories about wicked advocates who are punished for their bad deeds.

Chapter 6 begins with ballad talk (the ballad convention of narration through conversation) as it was adopted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets in verses both popular and literary in response to revived interest in the print mediation of traditional Anglo-Scottish ballads. The chapter pays particular attention to Christina Rossetti’s and Hardy’s ironic reworkings of ballad conventions. Their reliance on the expectations aroused by traditional ballads, the chapter argues, especially in the much harder cases of imagining intimate conversational relations with the silent dead or with God, prepares the depictions of failed intimacy in Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma and in Rossetti’s devotional colloquies and roundels. There talking with ghosts or with God becomes all too often a disappointed hope of resuming conversations that failed in life (Hardy) or painfully anticipating a silent harmony with God and the saints in paradise through the imperfect approximations of poetry (Rossetti).

Chapter 3 examines the third era of veterans’ return journeys, from 2006–16. This final period was defined by war commemoration. As Vietnam War commemoration surged in Australia and the United States, increasing numbers of Australian veterans chose to mark a string of major war anniversaries in Việt Nam, while the cultural militarization that paralleled the unfolding War on Terror led anti-war American veterans to reflect on their service. Việt Nam’s tourism industry tapped the growing Western market by turning toward kitsch reproductions of war that hinged on American memories. Organized tours became more popular as returnees became more diverse and reached retirement. Australian veterans strongly preferred commercial battlefield tourism and private troop reunions, while Americans favored peace- or healing-oriented returns. Among both groups, tours were refined and contained over the years to expatriate areas, increasingly marketing nostalgia tourism and secluding returnees from the realities of postwar Việt Nam.

This chapter explores Elena Ferrante’s use of Virgil’s Dido as a model for Elena and Lila, the two protagonists of the Neapolitan Novels, through the lens of absence. Not only is Ferrante able to conjure and comment on the Aeneid’s treatment of one of its most divisive characters following the classical rules of intertextual engagement with the ghosts of masterpieces past; she ends up changing the whole game. By teasing narrative material out of Virgil’s silences in Dido’s story-arch, Ferrante centres and requalifies the very reason of Dido’s undoing – the trauma which stems from the loss of love – as the generative force behind both Elena’s and her own literary output. However, by making Lila’s invisible writing and her subsequent disappearance into the beating heart of Elena’s writing, Ferrante uses Virgil as her Muse to stage a woman-centred takeover of literary greatness. Elena’s anxieties over how much of Lila’s life she has truly cannibalized, and her responsibility in Lila’s disappearance, not only take Virgil to task for hiding his Muse, but suggest an alternative model of criticism; moving beyond the postmodern view of the absent author and his unaccountability by giving agency back to the Muse.

This chapter examines Gothic traditions in East Asian cinema, with a specific focus on films and popular culture from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong. The chapter explores key features of the East Asian Gothic mode: generic hybridity, mythology, morality and important historical moments in the Western reception of influential films. The central argument uniting the analysis of these three distinct national cinemas concerns the narrative and thematic meaning of the figure of the ghost. How are local audiences expected and invited to respond to these avatars of the deceased? What do they reflect from contemporary society, and how do they comment on the past? The ghost in many of these films is not only an object of fear (indeed, it is frequently not an object of fear at all), but also, with varying frequency, a lover, or a hero or a subject of profound pity and sadness. The evolving meaning of the ghost in films from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong suggests some ways that definitions and understandings of the Gothic should be reconfigured for a global media context.

The career of Dora Sigerson (1866–1918), also known as Dora Sigerson Shorter, moves between the worlds of the nineteenth-century nationalist ballad and the Edwardian lyric. Born a year after W. B. Yeats, she established herself on the British literary scene, becoming a friend of Thomas Hardy and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Virginia Woolf, but experienced the Easter Rising as a traumatic call to reconnect with Ireland. A vein of agnostic anxiety runs through her work, which engages with themes of depression, ghostly visitations, and suicide. The poems of her final period move between private and public dramas, aspiring to a monumental framework (Sigerson was also a sculptor) but exploring Anglo-Irish relations through the familiar prism of a strained marriage. Her final work tackles wider themes of imperial wrongs, including slavery, while teetering on the edge of breakdown. Moving as she does between contrasting modes, Sigerson is a poet who has arguably still to find her audience, but whose work has much to tell us about how Irish poetry has been read and received over the last century.

This chapter portrays Ibsen as a world dramatist with commercial productions touring five continents between 1889 and 1916. These productions travelled on the well-established commercial theatre touring circuits of the late nineteenth century that used the shipping, rail and road networks of trade routes that linked European nations with their colonial settlements and diasporas. This early distribution of Ibsen's plays is visualized in the chapter using data from IbsenStage (https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no), the online database that holds 23,604 production records of Ibsen’s plays. At the heart of this chapter are the stories of the star actors who played Ibsen’s characters on their international touring circuits to show off their virtuoso skills.

The Ibsen play that most often led to problems with the theatre censor was Ghosts. This play, partly as a result of censorship, also became closely associated with the European independent theatre movement. The most famous censorship episode occurred when the newly formed Independent Theatre in London wanted to produce the play in March 1891 and realized that this could not be done without forming a private club. The result was a succès de scandale, fierce criticism and abuse from conservative critics. The play was not licensed in Britain until 1914, and, due to the longevity of the British censorship institution, new stage translations of Ibsen’s plays had to be assessed by the censor’s readers all the way until the abolition of the theatre censorship in 1969. From the beginning, Ibsen may have benefited from a somewhat laxer and less centralized censorship system in Scandinavia. When he started writing his most controversial plays, he was also an established author at home, enjoying considerable status. In addition to this, his plays appeared first as books, thus putting a certain pressure on the censorship simply by being available. This chapter also considers the censorship laws and practices in America, Germany, France and Russia. It shows how opponents of censorship all over Europe associated themselves with Ibsen.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Hegelian background to Marx’s thought and then attempts to situate him in the radical German emigration in Paris, Brussels and London, between 1843 and 1850. Until the summer of 1850, Marx continued to believe that a working-class uprising in France would provoke a revolutionary upheaval that would engulf Europe. In Class Struggles and The 18th Brumaire, Marx draws lessons for the German working class from the defeats of the French proletariat between 1848 and 1851. He does so by systematically contrasting the world of historical reality, the class struggle, and the realm of shadow and illusion in which historical actors fancy that their speeches and parliamentary manoeuvres make a difference. He explains brilliantly how Louis-Napoleon could have appeared as a saviour to the impoverished small peasantry. What is most striking about these essays is their rhetorical power – the literary skill with which Marx evokes the ghosts and shadows, the dreams, riddles and masquerades that constitute the realm of ideology and illusion. Marx’s essays on 1848–1851 give substance to his theories of ideology and false consciousness and do so in a way that fuses the spellbinding power of the imagery with the spell-banishing power of the historian.

This chapter examines parapsychology – the study of anomalous experience. It first distinguishes between telepathy, clairvoyance, ESP, psychokinesis (PK) and psi. It examines experimental evidence for psi, focussing on methodological difficulties in finding evidence for it, as well as at experimenter effects. It looks in particular at experiments in the Ganzfeld state as evidence for psi, and discusses meta-analyses of these experiments. We also look at remote viewing. We then look at spontaneous cases, including poltergeists. The chapter also looks at correlates of psi, in trait and state experiments. The chapter concludes with a survey of survival, particularly at the evidence for reincarnation.

Visions of the afterlife in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) circulated in collections of saints’ legends and sermons, in religious manuals, mystics’ writings, stand-alone pieces, and literary works. Along with the stories inherited from earlier centuries, there were many new accounts. Together they demonstrate how the medieval Church’s teachings on heaven, hell, and purgatory, as well as on prayers and masses for the dead, on engaging in the sacrament of penance, on accruing merit, on fighting against the demonic realm, and on devotion to the saints, were conveyed to, assimilated, and adapted by the laity. This chapter draws on several categories of these otherworld narratives, including visitations by ghosts, demons, and saints, and explores three primary spiritual dynamics illustrated by the visions:purgatorial ‘transactions of satisfaction’ with the ghosts, spiritual warfare with the demons, and ‘reciprocated devotion’ with the saints. The glimpses of the otherworlds and their inhabitants shored up the religious beliefs and practices of the late medieval laity.

Parnell haunts the city in James Joyce’s Dubliners. An admonishing ghost, he tantalizes its citizens with the abandoned dreams that follow Ireland’s rejection of their lost leader to  the warnings and strictures of the Roman Catholic Church following his adultery with Katherine O’Shea. James Duffy, at the centre of the story A Painful Case, is one such individual, searching for his sexual, spiritual, and political solace. A devotee of classical music, he meets the married Mrs Emily Sinico at a concert. What develops shakes Duffy to his soul for he recoils from her physical show of affection. They separate. A short while later he reads of her suicide, intoxicated, throwing herself before a train. Throughout the story strange echoes and eerie parallels between the fall of Parnell and the fall of James Duffy deepen the confusion and tragedies of both men, and of the Ireland that shaped their connected fates.

This chapter focuses on Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Michael Drayton’s Matilda (1594). Both poems are dedicated to women from overlapping and affirmedly Protestant circles, focused around the Sidneys and the Dudleys: namely, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (Rosamond), and Lucy Harrington, soon to be Countess of Bedford (Matilda). Yet Drayton and Daniel suffuse their poems with references to aspects of pre-Reformation devotional culture and flash-points of sixteenth-century religious controversy: indulgences, legendaries of saints’ lives, monasticism, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, pilgrimage, confession. Whilst some allusions can be read ironically, the deployment of these religious allusions is not consistently or straightforwardly critical. This chapter consequently explores the ambivalent shadow cast by these poets’ recourse to emblems of pre-Reformation piety and to the fault lines of Reformation ideology, and examines the way in which these complainants’ desire to tell their stories simultaneously activates memories of Reformation. It argues that, in doing so, Daniel and Drayton comment on the fictionality and potential transience of their own poetic memorials, and interrogate the way in which memory is posthumously preserved and contested in an age in which historical reputations were being rewritten, and which bore witness to deliberate acts of erasure.

This chapter examines a group of closely related pamphlets published in the late 1650s around the time of Oliver Cromwell’s death that stage a dramatic dialogue in the crypt of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, between the ghosts of Henry VIII and the freshly interred Charles I. A Messenger from the dead (to give these anonymous English and Latin texts a collective title) advances the extraordinary claim that the recent civil wars, the regicide and the nation’s descent into political turmoil represent God’s delayed punishment for Henry VIII’s alleged crimes against the Catholic Church several generations earlier. I argue that this unorthodox thesis is not unique to Messenger but enjoyed a wider circulation in seventeenth-century culture. In asking who promoted and stood to benefit from such an explanation of recent events, I explore the significant differences among the various texts of the pamphlets, including their place of publication and ideological motivation.