This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorising 'social haunting': the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.

Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social landscape is reinvented with reference to the ghosts of the past, the author explores the literary and historical status and accounts of the ghost, not for what they might tell us about these figures, but for their significance for our, constantly re-invented, re-vivified, re-ghosted social world. With chapters on haunted houses and castles, slave ghosts, the haunting airs of music, the prehistoric origin of spirits, Marxist spectres, Freudian revenants, and the ghosts in the machine, Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory adopts multi-disciplinary methods for understanding the past, the dead and social ghosts and the landscapes they appear in.

A sociology of haunting that illustrates how social landscapes have their genesis and perpetuation in haunting and the past, this volume will appeal to sociologists and social theorists with interests in memory, haunting and culture.

About the Author

Martyn Hudson is Associate Researcher and Project Coordinator at Newcastle University of the Co-Curate North-East project, and author of The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity and Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly: Memory and the Classical World.

Reviews

'This wide-ranging study of haunting as a social practice carefully excavates and illuminates the dazzling array of literal and metaphorical landscapes - from the prehistoric to the (post)colonial and from the musical to the digital - in which ghosts are sedimented, ready to re-emerge as social forces in the present.' - Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

'Hudson sets out to write a sociology of haunting, to delineate the 'social power of the ghost'. Using an associative logic that glides like a spectre through disciplinary boundaries, this book puts Marx, Brecht, Rilke and David Mitchell together, teases ghost stories from ancient landscapes and haunted houses, and even gets grumpy materialist Theodor Adorno together with wide-eyed spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge to meditate on the capacious possibilities bound up with ideas of social haunting. An absorbing, challenging read.' - Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck University of London, U.K

"Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory offers wide-ranging sociological analysis of ghosts and the places in which they appear. Unlike other volumes specializing in literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic reflections on ghosts, Hudson links their ephemeral appearance with rootedness in the social context of landscapes. [...] Hudson mirrors the difficulties that the living face in trying to grasp and describe the social power of ghosts. The experience of being haunted by ghosts in certain places is difficult to pin down. Hudson is to be commended for an original, interdisciplinary analysis of social ghosts and landscapes that will be of interest to readers in sociology, memory studies, philosophy, cultural studies and literature." - Siobhan Kattago, Memory Studies

'This wide-ranging study of haunting as a social practice carefully excavates and illuminates the dazzling array of literal and metaphorical landscapes - from the prehistoric to the (post)colonial and from the musical to the digital - in which ghosts are sedimented, ready to re-emerge as social forces in the present.' - Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

'Hudson sets out to write a sociology of haunting, to delineate the "social power of the ghost". Using an associative logic that glides like a spectre through disciplinary boundaries, this book puts Marx, Brecht, Rilke and David Mitchell together, teases ghost stories from ancient landscapes and haunted houses, and even gets grumpy materialist Theodor Adorno together with wide-eyed spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge to meditate on the capacious possibilities bound up with ideas of social haunting. An absorbing, challenging read.' - Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck University of London, UK

"Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory offers wide-ranging sociological analysis of ghosts and the places in which they appear. Unlike other volumes specializing in literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic reflections on ghosts, Hudson links their ephemeral appearance with rootedness in the social context of landscapes. [...] Hudson mirrors the difficulties that the living face in trying to grasp and describe the social power of ghosts. The experience of being haunted by ghosts in certain places is difficult to pin down. Hudson is to be commended for an original, interdisciplinary analysis of social ghosts and landscapes that will be of interest to readers in sociology, memory studies, philosophy, cultural studies and literature." - Siobhan Kattago, Memory Studies

Book Information
ISBN 9780367085452
Author Martyn Hudson
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g