Scholars, academics, learned people of all kinds, often crop up in fiction. Horror is no exception and ghost stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular, featured academics in lead roles. Sometimes this is as the result of ‘write what you know’ more than any other reason; M. R. James, coming up later (because of course he is) being a case in point. But, much more significantly, academics represent rational, empirical, and “modern” thought, in contrast to the superstitions of an older, darker age. The academic represents progress; sometimes as a means of rebutting the supernatural, but sometimes the supernatural could show that perhaps our progress had gone too far. Thank you to Sarah Burton on Twitter for prompting the idea for this reading list and thank you to those who offered suggestions (@cath_fletcher, @marccold, & @ssmithwc1n).
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The haunted academic, a reading list
- Post author By Peter Meinertzhagen
- Post date 10/02/2019
- No Comments on The haunted academic, a reading list
- Tags Andrew Taylor, Arthur Conan Doyle, Green Tea, How Love Came to Professor Guildea, In a Glass Darkly, Lot No. 249, M. R. James, Robert Hichens, Sheridan Le Fanu, Shirley Jackson, The Anatomy of Ghosts, The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, The Haunting of Hill House, The Mezzotint, Tongues of Conscience