Staff Publication: Super-Nature and the Environment
Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment
Eds Ruth Heholt & Niamh Downing
Rowman & Littlefield, 2016
How do we feel the natural ... and the supernatural?
This critical collection offers a fresh and innovative approach to contemporary debates about landscape and the supernatural. Landscapes are often uncanny spaces embroiled in the past; associated with absence, memory and nostalgia. Yet experiences of haunting must in some way always belong to the present: they must be felt.
This collection of essays opens up new and compelling areas of debate around the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape.
“Together, the essays in this volume offer a fascinating account of the relationship between our ideas of ghosts and our ideas of landscape. They remind us, usefully, of the importance of the unseen and unknown in the process of seeing, knowing and reading place and space.”
Landscape studies, supernatural studies, haunting and memory are all rapidly growing fields of enquiry and this book synthesises ideas from several critical approaches – spectral, affective and spatial – to provide a new route into these subjects.
Examining urban and rural landscapes, haunted domestic spaces, landscapes of trauma, and borderlands, this collection of essays is designed to cross disciplines and combine seemingly disparate academic approaches under the coherent locus of landscape and haunting.
Presenting a timely intervention in some of the most pressing scholarly debates of our time, Haunted Landscapes offers an attractive array of essays that cover topics from Victorian times to the present.
Dr Niamh Downing is our Head of Subject and lectures in English. You can find her on Twitter at @niamhdowning.
Dr Ruth Heholt is a Senior Lecturer in English. You can find her on Twitter at @RuthHeholt.
By Danielle Barrios-O'Neill