Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Eighteenth-Century Folk Horror: Roots, Representations and Retuns

Eighteenth-Century Folk Horror: Roots, Representations and Retuns

Edgar, Robert
Edgar, Robert
Smith, Adam James

Hardcover

Series: Bloomsbury Spectres, Hauntings and Horrors

Literary Criticism

PREORDER - Expected ship date September 16, 2027

ISBN10: 1350542822
ISBN13: 9781350542822
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Sep 16 2027
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.11
Height: 1.11 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Making a case that the origins of contemporary folk horror lie in texts from the eighteenth century, this book argues that the literary, critical and contextual ideas present in the genre today have both manifested elsewhere throughout British and American literary history. Through comparisons between folk horror and key moments in eighteenth-century literature in which the 'countryside' is mobilised as a space to reflect on and interrogate questions of memory, death and ritual, Edgar and Smith reveal that folk horror is in fact embedded in, and emerges from, well-established literary traditions that are galvanized every few generations to critique dominant cultural ideologies. Calling upon works that up until now have been associated with the gothic, the anti-pastoral and the sentimental and Romantic, Eighteenth-Century Folk Horror explores how an overemphasis on grouping rural horror in these categories has historically obfuscated a tradition which deploys the antipastoral to express intergenerational, epistemic angst that might now be recognized as distinctly hauntological.

Looking at texts including 'rural essays' in The Spectator (1711-1712), the sentimental poetry of Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith and Robert Burns and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Edgar and Smith move on to consider the provenance of the eighteenth-century imaginary in contemporary first and second wave folk horror on the page and screen in works from The Blood on Satan's Claw to Ghost Box Records and contemporary periodicals. Demonstrating that folk horror is itself haunted by longstanding literary traditions and cursed to revisit anxieties that have preoccupied writers since the English Civil Wars, this book offer exciting new perspectives on the origins of the genre.

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