Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

About Telling: Ghosts And Hauntings In Contemporary Drama And Poetry, Leif Erik Schenstead-Harris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It is difficult to think of something as formally resistant to definition as a ghost. What is more ambiguous than something described as “haunting”? Few currents in literature have been as prominent – and as comparatively unremarked – as the current critical and literary dependence on the language of spectrality. While ghost stories in prose have gained substantial attention, in drama and poetry ghosts and hauntings have found less critical purchase.

In response, this dissertation takes up a selection of drama and poetry from Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean to illustrate the theoretical and critical potential of ghosts and …