The Ghost

Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of British life. Their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify and inspire. In this broad cultural history, Susan Owens reveals what these spirits and apparitions can tell us about our culture and about ourselves.

A revelatory cultural history revealing what spirits, ghosts and apparitions can tell us about our culture, and about ourselves.

Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire. Our conceptions of ghosts – the fears they provoke, the forms they take – are connected to the conventions and beliefs of each particular era, from the marauding undead of the Middle Ages to the psychologically charged presences of our own age. The ghost is no less than the mirror of the times.

This dazzling new cultural history explores the ghost through the work of an extraordinary range of artists and writers, including William Hogarth, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Susan Hiller and Jeremy Deller; John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters.