Overview

In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Maria del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jose Marti, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernandez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.

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9780823242146

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<br> Clearly innovative and well researched, Blanco's study is a brave attempt to demystify the texts and authors put together by her inspired eclecticism. - K.M. Sibbald, CHOICE<p><br>

<br> Clearly innovative and well researched, Blanco's study is a brave attempt to demystify the texts and authors put together by her inspired eclecticism. - K.M. Sibbald, CHOICE<p><br> Classic and popular literature by Henry James and others lends a scholarly and detailed set of insights to this consideration of place and the evolution of haunting legends, making this a powerful, recommended pick for a range of libraries, from new age to literary and historical holdings alike. -Midwest Book Review<p><br>

Author Information

Maria del Pilar Blanco is Lecturer in Latin American Literature and Culture at University College London. She is the co-editor, with Esther Peeren, of Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture.

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