123041 PS PS Literary Studies (2025S)

In her cultural history of ghosts, Susan Owens explores how ghosts reflect changing attitudes, hopes and fears: ghosts, she says, “personify the layers of history beneath our feet, the old stories that refuse to be erased”. Ghost stories do not merely reflect anxieties about death and its permanence, about an afterlife, and about life itself. They represent attempts to make sense of the unknown, and to keep exploring our fears, whether they stem from contemporary concerns or more timeless questions.

This course focuses on the British ghost story as a long-standing storytelling and publishing tradition, and on some of its most popular examples of the long nineteenth century. From spectral apparitions to strange, unidentified noises, whether through a haunted house or a haunting phenomenon, on stage or in poems, the ghost story has taken on many forms within a certain set of parameters and engages with concerns that are in turn topical or universal. The 'pleasing terror' of ghost-seeing, ghost-hearing, but also – and most importantly – ghost-telling, can be read as entertainment, as part of a long literary tradition, and as the channelling of a historical, social and cultural background. While most of the tales we will study were published between 1860 and 1925, we will also explore the classical Gothic roots of the ghost story, as well as open up the conversation towards its evolution through the twentieth century.

In this course, participants will gain a knowledge of the British ghost story genre through texts from the 19th century and the early 20th century, as well as an understanding of how the ghost story functions in response to significant historical and cultural contexts, through the study of a variety of authors and texts. The course will also enable participants to develop their practical skills in the critical analysis of literary texts, and will tackle the basic techniques of academic writing, such as how to structure and write a paper.