eBook

Ghost-Watching American Modernity:Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination

Blanco, María del Pilar

2012,2020

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.

• Publisher: Fordham University Press,Temple University Press,American Literatures Initiative
• Subject: 19th century / 20th century / American / American and Latin American / American literature / American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism / American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism / American Studies / BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Comparative literature / Comparative literature -- American and Latin American / Comparative literature -- Latin American and American / ghosts / Ghosts in literature / Haunted places / haunting / History and criticism / landscape / Landscapes in literature / Latin American and American / Latin American Literature / Latin American Studies / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / Literary Studies / modernity / Nationalism in literature / SCIENCE / Space Science / Astronomy / Sociology / space / Spanish American literature / Spanish American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism / Spanish American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism / Supernatural / U.S. Literature
• ISBN: 9780823242146, 0823242145