Emerging Voices "Haunted" : Architectural Manifestations of Adult Phobias and Admonitions in the Haunted Houses of Children's and Young Adult Literature (original) (raw)
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The Terror of Home: The Haunted House Formula in Contemporary Culture
International Political Anthropology, 2022
The article explores the cultural significance of the haunted house formula in contemporary fiction and film. These narratives involve the fictive staging of a reversion to modes of thought and feeling which are integral to the experience of meaning, but repressed within core institutional arenas of the modern world. Latour, Lévy-Bruhl, Habermas and Bacon are drawn on to theorise the peculiarly modern severance between knowledge and meaning which these narratives transgress. Through a deliberate invocation of liminality, the haunted house formula enacts a kind of transcendence in which the modern 'self in a case' (Elias, 1978) is dissolved and individuals are restored to a condition of participation in their surroundings characteristic of older patterns of belief. Such participatory and existential modes of experience-simultaneously fascinating and terrifyingare particularly associated with the private sphere of the home, which has served as a refuge from rationalisation in modern societies; hence the centrality of domestic space in the haunted house formula.
Haunted by a House: The Terrors of Postmodernity in American Haunting House Tales
This thesis focuses on haunting house tales - fictions which depict an active and malevolent house - through the lens of postmodernism. Using the theories of Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon, the thesis analyzes three American haunting house novels: Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House," King's "The Shining," and Danielewski's "House of Leaves." Especially the notions of history, knowledge, and science are of relevance in this context. As is claimed, the haunting house does away with the idea that knowledge about the house and its past is empowering, since the supernatural events are not caused by a gruesome crime of the past. https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/37387
Things That Go Bump in the Literature: An Environmental Appraisal of “Haunted Houses”
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
This paper contains a narrative overview of the past 20-years of environmental research on anomalous experiences attributed to “haunted house.” This exercise served as a much-needed update to an anthology of noteworthy overviews on ghosts, haunts, and poltergeists (Houran and Lange, 2001b). We also considered whether new studies had incorporated certain recommendations made in this anthology. Our search revealed a relative paucity of studies (n = 66) on environmental factors that ostensibly stimulate haunt-type experiences. This literature was diverse and often lacked methodological consistency and adherence to the prior suggestions. However, critical consideration of the content revealed a recurring focus on six ambient variables: embedded (static) cues, lighting levels, air quality, temperature, infrasound, and electromagnetic fields. Their relation to the onset or structure of witness reports showed mostly null, though sometimes inconsistent or weak outcomes. However, such research as related to haunts is arguably in its infancy and new designs are needed to account better for environmental and architectural phenomenology. Future studies should therefore address four areas: (i) more consistent and precise measurements of discrete ambient variables; (ii) the potential role of “Gestalt influences” that involve holistic environment-person interactions; (iii) individual differences in attentional or perceptual sensitivities of percipients to environmental variables; and (iv) the role of attitudinal and normative influences in the interpretation of environmental stimuli. Focused scrutiny on these issues should clarify the explanatory power of evolutionary-environmental models for these and related anomalous experiences.
The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, 2018
Horror literature and film constructs the figure of the child through a set of binary oppositions: innocence and corruption, frightened and frightening, victim and predator, haunted and haunting. In Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), a novel about haunted and haunting children that has spawned numerous literary and filmic offspring, the child is a source of horror because its status in relation to these oppositions is undecidable. Are the orphans corrupt collaborators or innocent victims? In The Turn of the Screw, the undecidable nature of the child becomes the sources of its implacable Otherness, spawning the trope of the evil child found in many twentieth-and twenty-firstcentury horror texts. I want to trace the evolution of the figure of this haunted and haunting child from James's novel to twenty-first-century horror literature by John Harding (Florence and Giles, 2010) and Chris Priestley (Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, 2009). These recent works reconfigure the representational processes of horror fiction whereby the child has come to be synonymous with Otherness. In their depiction of horrifying children, Harding and Priestley show that corruption and innocence simultaneously coexist despite (and, indeed, as a result of) centuries of the representation and discursive construction of childhood in opposition to adulthood. Moreover, these
The Mechanics of Fear: Organic Haunted Houses in American Cinema
2012
Most haunted house narratives, whether literary or filmic, are based on the same basic principle of intrusion of some outside, usually unidentified force which sows the seeds of chaos and destruction within the boundaries of a home. What is particularly fascinating is precisely the way in which the group, and most often the family, reacts to this external force. But the whole point is also to determine the exact nature of the threat and to assess who—or what—the intruder is, so as to circumscribe “it” and return the community to some form of normality. In this respect, even though a direct descendant of a more conventional haunted house film genre, the 1980s family horror imposes a reversal of viewpoints. It actually seems to be reverting to some more classical Hollywood narrative structures after the bloodbaths of the previous decade in horror feasts, such as The Hills Have Eyes (1977) or Dawn of the Dead (1978), which argued then for a new form of society. It also demonstrates how...
Schizoid Masculinity and Monstrous Interiors in American Haunted House Narratives
2021
In this article, I propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to American Gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millennial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the Gothic literary world. The narrative strand which has emerged presents the reader with a new form of the Gothic male protagonist, whom the British psychologist R.D. Laing would describe as a ‘schizoid’ subject (Laing 17). Fragile, failing and fragmenting, he escapes a failing career, marriage and parenthood by removing his family to a quasi-domestic space which promises repair. Often combining work and home, the house rises up to meet the male schizoid, not merely as the traditional Gothic setting, but as a sentient being; a monster in its own right. His entrapment in this new Gothic labyrinth that is constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, provides a performative stage on which the schizoid male is forced into an existen...
"The 'Uncomfortable Houses' of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant"
Gothic Studies, 2010
Many nineteenth-century ghost-story writers focused on the haunted house, but these stories mainly concern themselves with the fear, danger, and near-escapes experienced by the people who spend time in the houses. The ghosts are usually pure evil, grotesquely described, and often seek to physically harm their visitors. Other authors during this period, however (and particularly women writers), chose to center their supernatural stories on connections between the ghosts in these houses and the living characters that dwell in them. These ‘relationships’ usually bring about a change in the way in which the house is haunted. For instance, the ghosts are less troubled after they are able to communicate a message to the living which enables a change to take place, namely stories of found wills, recovered inheritances, and reconnecting to loved ones who are still alive. In these stories, the living characters who encounter the ghosts also experience some kind of change or improvement. Often, the characters profit financially in respect to found treasure of some sort, or the characters profit emotionally, whereby their time in these houses leads to a greater sympathy for the deceased person or an awareness of their own shortcomings and prejudices in life. Women writers of the supernatural frequently used the motif of the haunted house to comment on property, class, and economic issues. In many of their stories, these ‘uncomfortable houses’, as they were popularly called at the time, are troubled because of some injustice or social inequality that left the past inhabitants seeking help from the current owners of the properties. Indeed, through the presence of the ghosts, the very ‘ownership’ of the properties is questioned. Often,as in Charlotte Riddell’s ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ from her collection, Weird Stories (1882), the troubled past comes to the knowledge of the present inhabitant in the form of a dream vision, visions which ultimately turn out to be quite real to the people who must deal with the ghosts. These dreams also lead to tangible results because by the end of the stories, the main characters have learned to change their present ways by taking more responsibility for their actions, and some characters actually find happy endings, as is the case in Riddell’s ‘Walnut-Tree House’. This idea alone makes women’s stories of haunted houses something different from their male counterparts, whereas in most stories by men, the apparition doing the haunting is malevolent and, in many cases, successfully drives the visitors or tenants out of the house by terrifying them with frightening visions, or even physical harm. Likewise, their presence in these houses and the traumas that led to their unhappy afterlives are usually never fully understood by readers. The added element of psychological appeasement that is such a part of ghost stories by women can be seen in both Riddell’s and Oliphant’s stories. For instance,in Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’, originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1882, the haunted property comes to the attention of the current owners through mysterious voices and moving shades which reside near certain parts of the house or grounds, parts which represent some past trauma for the former inhabitants. This trauma leads to reconciliation and a greater understanding between the living and the dead by the end of the story. The stories in this article each highlight the interest of the authors not simply to scare, but to teach readers lessons beyond the narrative. More so than their male counterparts, female authors increasingly turned to the ghost story as a way to critique the economic problems in both the impoverished streets and wealthy ancestral homes of England, as well as to shine a light on the emotional grievances existing behind closed doors. Issues of economic and social inequality arise just as frequently as the ghosts in these stories. Their troubled houses expanded the traditional idea of the haunted house as a place of fear and made it into something more meaningful,a place not only where fear resides but also where there is the potential for individual awareness, as well as mutual understanding that transcends the boundaries between life and death.
Virginia Woolf's Haunted House of Fiction
Journal of the Short Story in English, 2018
Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House" thwarts all readerly expectations. The story at once endorses and transgresses the rule of its genre, the ghost story, to become a playful and reflexive modernist text, a haunted intermediary space. In this article, I would like to suggest that the short story is haunted by texts and images and that this makes it a site of both inheritance and creative subversion, the very locus of early-twentieth-century literary crisis and experimentation. // « A Haunted House » de Virginia Woolf déjoue toutes attentes lectorielles. La nouvelle à la fois reprend et transgresse les lois de son genre, la ghost story ; elle s'impose comme un texte moderniste ludique et réflexif, véritable espace intermédiaire de hantise. Cet article analyse en quoi la nouvelle est hantée par des textes comme par des images ce qui en fait le site d'un héritage autant qu'un espace créatif de subversion, le lieu d'expression d'un geste expérimental émancipateur et d'une littérature qui, au début du vingtième siècle, est en crise.