Ghost representation: a study of bodily ghosts and materialisation of mind and body in mid-nineteenth-century female writers’ ghost fiction

Takumi, Mari (2021) Ghost representation: a study of bodily ghosts and materialisation of mind and body in mid-nineteenth-century female writers’ ghost fiction. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis studies the fictional ghosts created by the four writers in their ghost fiction, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charlotte Riddell. It aims to clarify two things: how these four writers create physical bodies of fictional ghosts and how their physical bodies materialise the contemporary scientific ideas on human body. Each chapter examines various ‘embodiments’ of ghosts through close reading of each text, particularly paying attention to the ways the ghosts manifest their bodily forms, or in some cases the ways they foreground physical significance and properties. The thesis explores the literary works of ghost or ghostly fiction that ranges from a novel to the stories published in periodicals and magazines over the period between 1840s and 1880s, while suggesting a cultural shift in the representation of fictional ghosts that runs parallel with the scientific shift of interest in mind and body from the physiological to the psychological.

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