scholarly journals Review of Victoria Margree, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-126
Author(s):  
Fiona Snailham
Keyword(s):  
Supernatural Fiction

scholarly journals Authoring the Strange: The Evolving Notions of Authorship in Prefaces to Classical Chinese Supernatural Fiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Weightman
Keyword(s):  
Classical Chinese ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Supernatural Fiction

Abstract This article considers the ways in which ideas of authorship have been portrayed in the authorial prefaces (zixu) to a selection of classical Chinese tales of the supernatural (zhiguai). It posits that the authorial preface is a unique forum for exploring the interplay between the author, reader and text. Within the controversial and contested tradition of writings about strange and otherworldly phenomena, it argues that over time the zixu provided a platform for the emergence of an increasingly individualised authorial persona.

‘The master-key that opens every door’: Hieroglyphs, Translations and Palimpsests

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-146
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Love Letters ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Supernatural Fiction

This chapter considers the translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs along with advancements in printing technologies across the nineteenth century, which led to an increased hieroglyphic presence in modern media. It focuses, in particular, in the use of hieroglyphs by authors of fiction, including H. Rider Haggard and E. Nesbit. In some cases, Egyptologists lent their expertise; alternatively, authors and designers consulted these experts’ grammars and dictionaries to construct their own (sometimes erroneous) meanings. Analysing the use of hieroglyphs in a variety of fiction and other cultural forms not only reveals networks of consultation between those with a professional and an amateur interest in ancient Egypt, but the wealth of connotations that the hieroglyphs suggested: from a magical language (often in children’s or supernatural fiction) to a romantic script suitable for love letters and secret correspondence (suited to romance, mystery, and detective genres). Meanwhile, increased tourism in Egypt resulted in the proliferation of palimpsestic chiselling of names onto temples and pyramids, while ankhs obelisks were incorporated into European and American grave designs. Ultimately, these uses of hieroglyphs reveal a bid for immortality, whether that of the individual or even the literary works that contemporary authors were inscribing with ancient Egyptian script.

Men, Masons and Melancholy: The Singularly Masculine Ghost Stories of Rudyard Kipling

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Professional Relationships ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Male Bonding ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Temporary Connection ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
Supernatural Fiction

Kipling's Indian ghost stories concern men – and men in company – just as much as they concern the occult or indeed the Empire and its British cultural origins. They arguably differ, though, from the conventional ghost story through their marked insistence upon the communal response to occult visitation – the need or drive to make haunting something which, if faced alone, is necessarily shared, and so dissipated in the act of communication. Masculinity, too, is characteristically interrogated here. In place of comfortable, familial – and familiar – surroundings, the protagonist is disorientated by the mutability of his environment, its shifts between imposed British paradigms and realities and enduring indigenous difference. In Kipling's supernatural fiction, the cliché of male bonding that promotes single-sex collegiate, fraternal or professional relationships perceptibly sustains the sometimes-temporary connection between disparate individuals immersed in the unprecedented stresses of colonial hauntings, ocean-borne monstrosity or wartime trauma.

Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Fiction, edited by Markus Altena Davidsen.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Fredrickson
Keyword(s):  
Supernatural Fiction

Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Fiction, edited by Markus Altena Davidsen. 2018, Routledge. Hb. £125.00/$155.00, ISBN 13: 9781138559660.

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