San Antonio College Library

A study of Gothic romances, ghosts, the devil, science and the supernatural, and other psychic motifs appearing in English fiction from Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" to the World War I period.

"Algernon Blackwood was one of the greatest writers of supernatural fiction of the twentieth century. An indefatigable traveller, an undercover agent during the First World War, a Searcher for the Red Cross, he was also an extremely popular storyteller on radio and television - indeed, he appeared on the first ever television programme. He originated the play, The Starlight Express, was a member of the magical order of the Golden Dawn, and was acquainted...

In The Fairy Way of Writing, Kevin Pask seeks to explain the origins and popularity of enchantment in Shakespeare's plays. Writers John Dryden and Joseph Addison originated the phrase "fairy way of writing" to define the concept of an English creative imagination founded on a synthesis of high literary culture and the popular culture of tales and superstitions. Beginning with Chaucer, Johnson, Dryden, and Milton, Pask argues that the fairy way of...

"From the Puritans' conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today's resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social issues. Spectral America asserts that ghosts, whether in oral tradition, literature, or such modern forms as...

"Much of Canada's contemporary fiction displays an eerie fascination with the supernatural. In DisPossession, Marlene Goldman investigates the links between spectral motifs and the social and historical influences that have shaped Canada. Incorporating both psychoanalytic and non-traditional methods of literary analysis, Goldman explores the ways in which spectral fictions are an expression of definitive Canadian experiences such as the clashes between...

"Victorian Hauntings asks its reader to consider the following questions: What does it mean to read or write with ghosts, or to suggest that acts of reading or writing are haunted? In what ways can authors in the nineteenth century be read so as to acknowledge the various phantom effects which return within their texts? In what ways do the traces of such 'ghost' writing surface in the works of Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot and Hardy? How does the work...