This book is written in an accessible style, and draws together a wide range of modern and contemporary Gothic texts from throughout the Americas (including Gothic drama as well as fiction). The title offers a decolonizing approach to the Gothic that has not previously been touched on much in the genre. The book is unique in its treatment of its subject; there are very few titles that study childhood and the Gothic in the Americas

This book argues for a renewed understanding of the fundamentally uncanny quality of the medium of photography. It especially makes the case for the capacity of certain photographs—precisely through their uncanniness—to contest structures of political and social dominance. The uncanny as a quality that unsettles the perception of home emerges as a symptom of modern and contemporary society and also as an aesthetic apparatus by which some key photographs critique the hegemony of capitalist and industrialist domains. The book’s historical scope is large, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot and closing with contemporary indigenous photographer Bear Allison and contemporary African American photographer Devin Allen. Through close readings, exegesis, of individual photographs and careful deployment of contemporary political and aesthetic theory, The Photographic Uncanny argues for a re-envisioning of the political capacity of photography to expose the haunted, homeless, condition of modernity.

Dread of the unknown fills us with both unease and curiosity. We laugh, nervously, at tales of haunted houses and phantoms, yet something looms. There is a shadow behind life that creeps through its walls and knocks, and we know it is a fear of the unknown that makes each heart beat faster. Life is uncanny. We are equally attracted to and repulsed by what scares us. The unknown will persist thanks to literature, and that is where the ghosts will always live. This collection presents twenty-nine eerie narratives drenched in an otherworldly fog. Ghosts stalk these pages, and the ominous specter of Death peers out with an amused grin. Separated into two parts, this collection contains both ghastly stories of death and bizarre tales of the unknown. These tales were all chosen for their uncanny aesthetics and their compelling narratives. Marvel at the literary and haunting expertise of classic writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, and more.

Murray Pomerance's latest book explores an encyclopedic range of films and television shows to demonstrate the difficulty of conveying the experience of viewing cinema through words and the medium of text. From On the Waterfront to Marriage Story, Uncanny Cinema illuminates that words and writing are in perilous waters when applied to cinema, similar to ungestured talk. The book begins with this problem using Julian Jaynes's thoughts on vocality and imagination before delving into three exploratory 'movements' arranged to alternately challenge, inspire, and confound the reader to question if we know what we think we know or even see what we think we see. The viewer is faced with disturbances, ruptures, and surprises that occur during the viewing experience, which Pomerance analyzes to stretch the sense of what we do and do not (or, possibly, cannot) know, particularly as we think, talk, and write about cinema.

Superhero comics reckon with issues of corporeal control. And while they commonly deal in characters of exceptional or superhuman ability, they have also shown an increasing attention and sensitivity to diverse forms of disability, both physical and cognitive. The essays in this collection reveal how the superhero genre, in fusing fantasy with realism, provides a visual forum for engaging with issues of disability and intersectional identity (race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality) and helps to imagine different ways of being in the world. Working from the premise that the theoretical mode of the uncanny, with its interest in what is simultaneously known and unknown, ordinary and extraordinary, opens new ways to think about categories and markers of identity, Uncanny Bodies explores how continuums of ability in superhero comics can reflect, resist, or reevaluate broader cultural conceptions about disability. The chapters focus on lesser-known characters—such as Echo, Omega the Unknown, and the Silver Scorpion—as well as the famous Barbara Gordon and the protagonist of the acclaimed series Hawkeye, whose superheroic uncanniness provides a counterpoint to constructs of normalcy. Several essays explore how superhero comics can provide a vocabulary and discourse for conceptualizing disability more broadly. Thoughtful and challenging, this eye-opening examination of superhero comics breaks new ground in disability studies and scholarship in popular culture. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sarah Bowden, Charlie Christie, Sarah Gibbons, Andrew Godfrey-Meers, Marit Hanson, Charles Hatfield, Naja Later, Lauren O’Connor, Daniel J. O'Rourke, Daniel Pinti, Lauranne Poharec, and Deleasa Randall-Griffiths.

The author of this book, May Sinclair, was an innovator of modern fiction. She lived in the late Victorian era, and her stories were quite untypical of the time. She is considered a precursor to Virginia Woolf. The specific trait of the Uncanny Stories (1923) by Sinclair is a combination of the traditional ghost story with the discoveries of Freud and Einstein. The stories shock, enthrall, delight, and unsettle.

Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny: Nomadism, Technique and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave examines the psychedelic rave music and culture with a focus on the multiday phantasmagoric events organized in mountains, deserts, beaches, and other exotic destinations. Using mobile and multi-sited ethnography, the author follows the routes of a diverse group of Greek EDM and party enthusiasts across the festival map of psychedelic-trance gatherings, including Hungary, Morocco, and Greece, with the aim of investigating the revelatory experience of the chemical psychedelic raving. By situating the rave experience within the phantasmagoria of the festival – a dreamworld par excellence of the alien and the uncanny – the work reformulates questions of ‘liminality’, ‘spirituality’, ‘community’ and ‘identity’ while initiating a discussion about the limits of cosmopolitanism and aesthetics as they are reorganized in the techno-political conditions of the 21st century. In an intense and at times demanding theoretical ‘journey’, the author reframes questions of taste, consumption, altered experience, and lifestyle through the lens of technology or technoaesthetics, speculating on an impending techno-social world of augmented senses and artificial impressions, thus posing questions to the reader about the mediation of social and public events, and the reification of ‘utopian’ paradises in the form of contemporary dreamworlds.

Sex, Time and Place extensively widens the scope of what we might mean by 'queer London studies'. Incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives – including social history, cultural geography, visual culture, literary representation, ethnography and social studies – this collection asks new questions, widens debates and opens new subject terrain. Featuring essays from an international range of established scholars and emergent voices, the collection is a timely contribution to this growing field. Its essays cover topics such as activist and radical communities and groups, AIDS and the city, art and literature, digital archives and technology, drag and performativity, lesbian Londons, notions of bohemianism and deviancy, sex reform and research and queer Black history. Going further than the existing literature on Queer London which focuses principally on the experiences of white gay men in a limited time frame, Sex, Time and Place reflects the current state of this growing and important field of study. It will be of great value to scholars, students and general readers who have an interest in queer history, London studies, cultural geography, visual cultures and literary criticism.

Clergyman in rural Indiana. Canadian author.