Ghost story
While ghost stories are often explicitly meant to scare, they have been written to serve all sorts of purposes, from comedy to morality tales.
As summarized by Frank Coffman for a course in popular imaginative literature, they were:[7] The introduction of pulp magazines in the early 1900s created new avenues for ghost stories to be published, and they also began to appear in publications such as Good Housekeeping and The New Yorker.
[15] The 11th century Japanese work The Tale of Genji contains ghost stories, and includes characters being possessed by spirits.
Seneca's influence is particularly evident in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet, both of which share a revenge theme, a corpse-strewn climax, and ghosts among the cast.
Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass, in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, point out, "In fact, it is as laughter increasingly threatens the Ghost that he starts to be staged not in armor but in some form of 'spirit drapery'."
An interesting observation by Jones and Stallybrass is that "at the historical point at which ghosts themselves become increasingly implausible, at least to an educated elite, to believe in them at all it seems to be necessary to assert their immateriality, their invisibility.
"[18] In Spain, the legend of Catalina Lercaro stands out, a young woman from the 16th century, who committed suicide so as not to have to marry a man she did not love.
Ballads of this type include "The Unquiet Grave", "The Wife of Usher's Well", and "Sweet William's Ghost", which feature the recurring theme of returning dead lovers or children.
Kleist's "The Beggar Woman of Locarno", published in 1810, and several other works from the period lay claim to being the first ghost short stories of a modern type.
[23] Notable examples of the genre from the 1830s include Gogol's "Viy" and Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades", although there were scores of other stories from lesser known writers, produced primarily as Christmas fiction.
His ghost stories, "Wandering Willie's Tale" (1824, first published as part of Redgauntlet) and The Tapestried Chamber (1828) eschewed the "Gothic" style of writing and helped set an example for later writers in the genre.
[24] Sullivan argues that the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu inaugurated this "Golden Age".
Le Fanu's collections, such as In a Glass Darkly (1872) and The Purcell Papers (1880), helped popularise the short story as a medium for ghost fiction.
M. R. James summed up the essential elements of a ghost story as, "Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded ...".
David Langford has described British author M. R. James as writing "the 20th century's most influential canon of ghost stories".
The classic Jamesian tale usually includes the following elements: According to James, the story must "put the reader into the position of saying to himself, 'If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!
'"[30] He also perfected the technique of narrating supernatural events through implication and suggestion, letting his reader fill in the blanks, and focusing on the mundane details of his settings and characters in order to throw the horrific and bizarre elements into greater relief.
"[30] Despite his suggestion in the essay "Stories I Have Tried to Write" that writers employ reticence in their work, many of James's tales depict scenes and images of savage and often disturbing violence.
Washington Irving's short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), based on an earlier German folktale, features a Headless Horseman.
[22] In the later 19th century, mainstream American writers such as Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman[33] and F. Marion Crawford[34] all wrote ghost fiction.
The introduction of pulp magazines in the early 1900s created new avenues for ghost stories to be published, and they also began to appear in publications such as Good Housekeeping and The New Yorker.
In the United States, prior to and during the First World War, folklorists Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp collected ballads from the people of the Appalachian Mountains, which included ghostly themes such as "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter", "The Suffolk Miracle", "The Unquiet Grave" and "The Wife of Usher's Well".
These songs were variants of traditional British ballads handed down by generations of mountaineers descended from the people of the Anglo-Scottish border region.
[2] Noël Coward's play Blithe Spirit, later made into a 1945 film, places a more humorous slant on the phenomenon of haunting of individuals and specific locations.
[46] In the horror genre, 1980's The Fog, and the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of films from the 1980s and 1990s are notable examples of the trend for the merging of ghost stories with scenes of physical violence.
[48] Generally the films are based on the experiences of modern people who are unexpectedly exposed to ghosts, and usually draw on traditional Indian literature or folklore.
