At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only ghost story among Toni Morrison snine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places aboundin the celebrated author s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses spectersto bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories andexperiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores.
Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expandingnotions of the supernatural within American and African...

The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities is a collection of essays expanding the concepts of "ghost" and "haunting" beyond literary tools used to add supernatural flavor to include questions of identity, visibility, memory and trauma, and history. Using a wide scope of texts from varying time periods and cultures, including fiction and film, this collection explores the phenomenon of social ghosts. What does it mean, for example, to be invisible, to be a ghost, particularly when that ghost is representative of a person or group living on the margins of society?...