Ghostly Alterities. Spectrality and Contemporary Literatures in English

Ghostly Alterities analyses the meaning of ghostliness in contemporary Anglophone novels – Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2002), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995) – in which the figure of the ghost is often entrusted with the task of questioning Western culture and history. After an introductory chapter which investigates Freud’s concept of the uncanny along with theoretical issues raised by Iain Chambers and Jacques Derrida, Ghostly Alterities discusses the novels from different critical orientations (postcolonialism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), presenting ghostliness as intersecting with three major themes: the problem of the spectre’s visibility and “bodily” nature; the particular melancholic state of mind the ghost can trigger which brings about a very special kind of (g)hospitality; the spectral nature of history and its relationship with the characters’ personal memory.



Bianca Del Villano received her PhD in Literatures in English from the University of Turin and has now a research fellowship at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” where she also teaches English literature. Her main research interests are contemporary literature (particularly in its connections with cinema) and Shakespeare as studied from the critical perspectives of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and postcolonialism. Her publications include essays on Shakespeare, Arundhati Roy, postcolonialism, and cinema.