The Spectral Metaphor

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor

   • Esther Peeren

   Pages 1-32

3. Forms of Invisibility: Undocumented Migrant Workers as Living Ghosts in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

   • Esther Peeren

   Pages 33-75

4. Spectral Servants and Haunting Hospitalities: Upstairs, Downstairs, Gosford Park and Babel

   • Esther Peeren

   Pages 76-109

5. Spooky Mediums and the Redistribution of the Sensible: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black

   • Esther Peeren

   Pages 110-143

6. Ghosts of the Missing: Multidirectional Haunting and Self-Spectralization in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park

   • Esther Peeren

   Pages 144-179

7. Afterword: How to Survive as a Living Ghost?

   • Esther Peeren

   Pages 180-184

8. Back Matter

   Pages 185-216

   PDF

What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects – migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons – are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this figuration can signify both dispossession and empowerment or agency.

• America
• bibliography
• hospital
• imagination
• living
• Medium
• metaphor
• migrant
• migrants
• migration
• subject
• time
• British and Irish Literature

"This is an important and original work of criticism. The perspective it adopts is fresh and gripping; the application of the 'spectral metaphor' to non-literal situations, such as the 'invisibility' of migrant workers and domestic servants, expands the sense of 'spectrality' in fascinating new ways; the scholarship and theoretical acumen are superb throughout; the written style of the work is elegant, precise and accessible; and the political and ethical implications of the study are lucidly spelled out, without any attempt prematurely to resolve the most difficult issues." - Colin Davis, Royal Holloway University of London, UK

• Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

  Esther Peeren

Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Netherlands. She authored Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture (2008) and co-edited Popular Ghosts (2010) and The Spectralities Reader (2013).

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