The Urban Uncanny explores through ten engaging essays the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city—as the organised and familiar environments in which citizens live, work, and go about their lives—and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it evokes. The city is uncanny when it reveals itself in new and unexpected light; when its streets, buildings, and people suddenly appear strange, out of place, and not quite right. Bringing together a variety of approaches, including psychoanalysis, historical and contemporary case study of cities, urban geography, film and literary critique, the essays explore some of the unsettling mismatches between city and citizen in order to make sense of each, and to gauge the wellbeing of city life more generally. Essays examine a number of cities, including Edmonton, London, Paris, Oxford, Las Vegas, Berlin and New York, and address a range of issues, including those of memory, death, anxiety, alienation, and identity. Delving into the complex repercussions of contemporary mass urban development, The Urban Uncanny opens up the pathological side of cities, both real and imaginary. This interdisciplinary collection provides unparalleled insights into the urban uncanny that will be of interest to academics and students of urban studies, urban geography, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, social studies and film studies, and to anyone interested in the darker side of city life.

This title examines and interrogates the concept of the 'uncanny', and the cultural contexts which allow such experiences of disorientation and alienation.

A chilling stand-alone novel by the acclaimed David Macinnis Gill. This original and sinister spin on gothic tradition will appeal to fans of Asylum, American Horror Story: Coven, and The Walking Dead. When a bolt of lightning causes a Boston-wide blackout on her sixteenth birthday, Willow Jane doesn’t think anything of it—until she begins stopping time, until she comes face-to-face with her menacing familiar, until her sister disappears. But these aren’t the only strange and horrifying things to come out of the storm. An ancient witch named the Shadowless has awoken and escaped from her crypt, and she’s looking for revenge on Willow Jane’s family. From the critically acclaimed author of Black Hole Sun and Soul Enchilada, this eerie horror story lingers long after its bloody end, and is perfect for fans of Madeleine Roux, The Ghost Files, and anyone who likes things that go bump in the night.

The book SENSI/ABLE SPACES focuses on the ways in which space, art and the environment interlace and interact, dealing with the perception and conception of spaces in the built as well as natural environment. The book brings together a wide range of academics, from the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as artists who have an interest in the way space is sensed, understood and reconfigured. Spaces today are continually being reconstituted and reformulated in various ways, often relying on notions of what is sensible, narrowly defined by groups with an ideological agenda of some kind or vested economic interests. These sensible factors often obscure and ignore notions of the sensable-that which people perceive through the senses while being-in spaces. Space is a topic equally of various academic fields, such as geography, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, physics, bilology, and many more. But space is also the subject of - or a frame for - any artist, whose work is neither academic, in any standard sense of the term, and yet heavily theoretical or speculative.

Bernstein explores the representation of the city in Victorian fiction--from the scandal of its slums, through the sublime of its fashionable society, to a darker urban sublime. The Celebration of Scandal analyzes the urban fiction of both well-known novelists (Dickens, Gissing, James, and Meredith) and more marginal writers (Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton) in terms of their representations of the city, both the scandalous and the sublime. It also includes a discussion of the dandy novels of Catherine Gore, whose parodies of high life are virtually unknown to modern readers. Bernstein explores the scandals lying at the heart of the representation of the city in Victorian fiction. Social scandals--slums that belie the myths of urban progress, for instance--are only intensified by methods of representation that overturn mimetic conventions. But if one pole of this study is the scandal, then its opposite is the sublime. Bernstein examines the parodic mode of the dandy and moves to the serious urban sublime that records urban experience in its ambiguity, its narcissism, its negativity, and its strength. Bernstein then discusses fictional and nonfictional urban sketches that present many of the problems facing urban artists in their encounters with the city. She stakes out new territory, blending the work of major critics of Victorian literature (Steven Marcus, Hillis Miller, etc.), lesser-known nineteenth-century urban texts, and a substantial dosage of Continental materials, ranging from the crucial work of Baudelaire and his great expositor, Walter Benjamin, to theorists such as Freud, Bakhtin, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan.

Uncanny Congruencies investigates elliptical collisions of association and meaning and offers a nuanced dialogue with its audiences through the seemingly contradictory processes of 18 remarkable alumni of Penn State's School of Visual Arts. The works of these artists intersect, reverse and overlap one another in surprising and satisfying ways.