This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's extraordinary essay of 1919, 'The Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche). Above all, Freud was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious, but strangely familiar.
As a ghostly feeling and concept, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers...

A mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction, White Spines is a book about Nicholas Royle's passion for Picador's fiction publishing from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s.

In this one-of-a-kind book, novelist and academic Nicholas Royle brings together two remarkably different creative figures: Enid Blyton and David Bowie. His exploration of their lives and work delves deeply into questions about the value of art, music and literature, as well as the role of universities in society. Blending elements of memoir and cultural commentary, Royle creates a tender and often hilarious portrait of family life during the pandemic, weaving it together with musings on dreams, second-hand bookshops and unpublished photos of Bowie taken by Stephen Finer. He also shares...