Ghosts and Religious Life in Early China

For modern people, ghost stories are no more than thrilling entertainment. For those living in antiquity, ghosts were far more serious beings, as they could affect the life and death of people and cause endless fear and anxiety. How did ancient societies imagine what ghosts looked like, what they could do, and how people could deal with them? From the vantage point of modernity, what can we learn about an obscure, but no less important aspect of an ancient culture? In this volume, Mu-chou Poo explores the ghosts of ancient China, the ideas that they nurtured, and their role in its culture. His study provides fascinating insights into the interaction between the idea of ghosts and religious activities, literary imagination, and social life devoted to them. Comparing Chinese ghosts with those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, Poo also offers a wider perspective on the role of ghosts in human history.

5. The plot thickens…and thins

‘The plot thickens…and thins’ describes the changing status of plot in the genre. For much of the 19th century, anecdote and incident inspired short fiction written for a mass market. The incident or anecdote-based short story made a virtue of brevity, and the economy of style and consequential arrangement of causes and effects well suited slice-of-life episodes, whodunits, and ghost stories. What these modes all share is a skill in building up suspense. Yet the genre has been enjoying a long postmodernist reincarnation in which it has adopted almost the opposite approach. Losing the plot has been a source of fictional experimentation and liberation from linearity. Repetition with subtle variation has become a key structure.

Intimations of Mortality: Death in Children's Fantasy

<p>"Children's books have always been filled with death," Patrick Ness writes in his review of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. "You can't have an orphan without at least two dead people, after all." Literary childhood, from its origins, is not only associated with, but commonly defined by the experience of loss. This thesis argues that children's literature is fixated on endings; that it is marked by the insistent, and persistent, presence of mortality. Further, it argues that mortality is not just a prevalent theme, but a fundamental organising principle both thematically and structurally, working to define the genre and shape its form and substance. The mortal notes in children's literature are an inevitable effect of the peculiar conditions of its production. Children do not, for the most part, write their own literature: it is written by adults who necessarily write to, of, and for the child from a point in time irrevocably apart from it. Critic Jacqueline Rose has famously articulated the "acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee" on which children's literature rests. The overwhelming presence of mortality in the genre is a direct effect of the rupture at its heart: inevitably aware of the acknowledged difference between writer and addressee, and filtered through adult memory and imagination, literary childhood cannot help but be framed as eulogy and elegy, constructed as the beginning of an ending. This reading, then, addresses the gap between adult and child that has occupied children's literature criticism for almost thirty years, but it moves beyond questions of power and control to focus on its creative effects. The thesis explores mortality and the construction of literary childhood in relation to adulthood in a range of fantasy subgenres. It begins with the classics of the Victorian Golden Age, exploring the writing of childhood at the origins of modern children's fantasy. The chapters on animal stories, toy stories and ghost stories all shed light on the figuring of childhood through close association and identification, each foregrounding particular qualities with which literary childhood is invested. In animal characters, primacy is given to an intense and largely contextless vitality, to an orientation in a paradoxically eternal and eternally fleeting present moment. Toys are memory boxes, highlighting the importance of the child (and children's literature) as a lieu de mémoire. Ghost characters emphasise the ways in which childhood is figured as past and as haunting, memorialised even in its presence. In time-slips and alternate world fantasy, the dissonant once-and-future oriented, mortal qualities of literary childhood manifest themselves in the manipulation of the time and space of setting. But as dependent as the impulse to elegy is on difference, it also depends for its entire effect on the inescapable continuity between adult and child. Put another way, we were once them. They will be us. That the "impossible" relation between adult and child is so neatly encapsulated by the memento mori – "that which you are, we were; that which we are, you shall be" – speaks to how and why mortality casts so deep a shadow in the literature.</p>

Intimations of Mortality: Death in Children's Fantasy

<p>"Children's books have always been filled with death," Patrick Ness writes in his review of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. "You can't have an orphan without at least two dead people, after all." Literary childhood, from its origins, is not only associated with, but commonly defined by the experience of loss. This thesis argues that children's literature is fixated on endings; that it is marked by the insistent, and persistent, presence of mortality. Further, it argues that mortality is not just a prevalent theme, but a fundamental organising principle both thematically and structurally, working to define the genre and shape its form and substance. The mortal notes in children's literature are an inevitable effect of the peculiar conditions of its production. Children do not, for the most part, write their own literature: it is written by adults who necessarily write to, of, and for the child from a point in time irrevocably apart from it. Critic Jacqueline Rose has famously articulated the "acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee" on which children's literature rests. The overwhelming presence of mortality in the genre is a direct effect of the rupture at its heart: inevitably aware of the acknowledged difference between writer and addressee, and filtered through adult memory and imagination, literary childhood cannot help but be framed as eulogy and elegy, constructed as the beginning of an ending. This reading, then, addresses the gap between adult and child that has occupied children's literature criticism for almost thirty years, but it moves beyond questions of power and control to focus on its creative effects. The thesis explores mortality and the construction of literary childhood in relation to adulthood in a range of fantasy subgenres. It begins with the classics of the Victorian Golden Age, exploring the writing of childhood at the origins of modern children's fantasy. The chapters on animal stories, toy stories and ghost stories all shed light on the figuring of childhood through close association and identification, each foregrounding particular qualities with which literary childhood is invested. In animal characters, primacy is given to an intense and largely contextless vitality, to an orientation in a paradoxically eternal and eternally fleeting present moment. Toys are memory boxes, highlighting the importance of the child (and children's literature) as a lieu de mémoire. Ghost characters emphasise the ways in which childhood is figured as past and as haunting, memorialised even in its presence. In time-slips and alternate world fantasy, the dissonant once-and-future oriented, mortal qualities of literary childhood manifest themselves in the manipulation of the time and space of setting. But as dependent as the impulse to elegy is on difference, it also depends for its entire effect on the inescapable continuity between adult and child. Put another way, we were once them. They will be us. That the "impossible" relation between adult and child is so neatly encapsulated by the memento mori – "that which you are, we were; that which we are, you shall be" – speaks to how and why mortality casts so deep a shadow in the literature.</p>

Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming

The landscape of trauma is scattered with ghosts. Wolves hunkering in the shadows. Memory’s spectral persistence and evasion. Leaky bodies and selves gathered up in the storm of pain. Genders imposed and genders made. History’s cruel excisions, scars, the spillage of wounds. A landscape in which we are nevertheless called to build home. Here, “storytelling is a kind of suturing.” Combining memoir, lyrical essay, and cultural criticism, KJ Cerankowski's Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life. Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley conceived of the central idea for Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus—most often referred to simply as Frankenstein—during the summer of 1816 while vacationing on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It is her first and most famous novel. Although the assertion is debatable, some scholars have argued that Frankenstein is the first work of modern science fiction. Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein in response to a “ghost story” writing contest between herself, Percy Shelley, Percy Shelley’s physician and friend John Polidori, and Lord Byron, who were trapped indoors reading German ghost stories as the result of inclement weather. Polidori’s contribution to this contest, “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819), influenced the development of Gothic literature. According to Shelley, she drew inspiration from a nightmare she had, which she attributed to discussions she overheard between Percy and Byron regarding experiments with electricity and animation. Shelley began working on the novel when she returned home to England in September, and the book’s first edition was published anonymously in 1818. Shelley’s father William Godwin made minor revisions for a second edition in 1821; and Shelley herself made more substantial changes for the third edition in 1831. The story is told through an epistolary frame, and follows Victor Frankenstein, a university student of the “unhallowed arts” who assembles, animates, and abandons an unnamed human-like creature. The creature goes on to haunt his creator both literally and metaphorically. Over the past two hundred years, the story has been widely influential, and re-interpreted in various forms of culture and media. In literary studies, scholars have discussed which edition of the text is the “truest” to Mary Shelley’s intended vision. The novel has been analyzed for its messages about human pride and hubris, the pursuit of knowledge, the nature/nurture question, as put forth by Rousseau, ethical questions in medicine and science, and family, gender, and reproduction, among other topics.