Subjects
Visions of an Unseen World:
Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England
Sasha Handley
Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World
978 1 85196 888 6: 216x138mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 549 6
This book describes the haunting of eighteenth-century England. It is the first in-depth study of the production, circulation and consumption of English ghost stories during the Age of Reason.
Handley combines close textual analysis with a broad conception of historical change. In so doing, she shows how ghost stories reveal some of the underlying concerns and conflicts of eighteenth-century life. She examines a variety of media: ballads and chapbooks, newspapers, sermons, medical treatises and scientific journals, novels and plays. Through these, Handley relates the telling of ghost stories to wider changes associated with the Enlightenment, arguing that they played a key role in battles against atheism, material excess and secularisation. She also links ghost stories to broader cultural trends such as Romanticism and gothic fictions.
Sample pages
Readership
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Gothic Studies, Religious Studies, Print Culture
Contents
Introduction: The Ghosts of Early Modern England
1 Restoration Hauntings
2 Printing the Preternatural in the Late Seventeenth Century
3 A New Canterbury Tale
4 Ghost Stories in the Periodical Press, c.1700 – c.1750
5 Confessional Cultures and Ghost Beliefs, c.1750 – c.1800
6 Landscapes of Belief and Everyday Life in Late Eighteenth-Century England
Conclusion
Reviews
'this is another significant historical study of ghost belief, ... Handley's work helps rescue ghost stories from the footnotes of History, and relocates them as a key element of the beliefs and culture surrounding death and the fate of the soul.'
– John Newton, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
'Sasha Handley’s excellent study of the meaning, recording and use of ghost stories in the ‘long eighteenth century’ is a refreshing and much needed study.'
– Owen Davies, Journal of Ecclesiastical History
'a very useful study of, and compendium of references to, ghosts beliefs and stories in early modern England.'
– David Elton Gay, Fabula
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