Ghosts and Their Hosts by Sladja Blazan

Ghosts and Their Hosts by Sladja Blazan

Ghost stories as a window on the American settler psyche In this innovative book, Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a literal medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human labor exploitation. Blažan breaks with the long tradition of reading ghosts as harbingers of justice, arguing that early American ghost stories worked instead to suppress the presence of non-Europeans through fantasies of European transcultural incorporation. Images of sentient forests and nature possessed by spirits helped develop fixed racial, gendered, and sexualized categories, while authors used ghosts to affirm existing hierarchies and establish new ones. Focusing on the cultural exchanges between Germany, England, France, and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, Blažan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13
Title	Ghosts and Their Hosts
Author	Sladja Blazan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type
Publisher
Year published
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.