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With Halloween quickly approaching, UTP has pulled together a list of reads to get you in the mood for the spookiest season of all. Check out some titles that cover topics such as witchcraft, horror films, and ghostly beings.
The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul
Edited by Gina Freitag and André Loiselle
From the cheaply made “tax-shelter” films of the 1970s to the latest wave of contemporary “eco-horror,” Canadian horror cinema has rarely received much critical attention. Featuring chapters on Pontypool, Ginger Snaps, 1970s slasher films, Quebec horror, and the work of David Cronenberg, among many others, The Canadian Horror Film unearths the terrors hidden in the recesses of the Canadian psyche.
European Magic and Witchcraft: A Reader
Edited by Martha Rampton
Magic, witches, and demons have drawn interest and fear throughout human history. In this comprehensive primary source reader, Martha Rampton traces the history of our fascination with magic and witchcraft from the first through to the seventeenth century.
Ghostly Paradoxes:
Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism
By Ilya Vinitsky
Nineteenth-century Russia was consumed with a passion for spiritualist activities such as table-rappings, seances of spirit communication, and materialization of the ‘spirits.’ Ghostly Paradoxes examines the surprising relationship between spiritualist beliefs and practices and the positivist mindset of the Russian Age of Realism (1850-80) to demonstrate the ways in which the two disparate movements influenced each other.
John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps
By Ernest Mathijs
Few studies of Canadian cinema to date have engaged deeply with genre cinema and its connection to Canadian culture. Ernest Mathijs does just that in this volume, which traces the inception, production, and reception of Canada’s internationally renowned horror film, Ginger Snaps (2000). This tongue-in-cheek Gothic film, which centres on two death-obsessed teenage sisters, draws a provocative connection between werewolf monstrosity and female adolescence and boasts a dedicated world-wide fan base.
The Medieval Devil: A Reader
Edited by Richard Raiswell and David R. Winter
The Medieval Devil is a unique collection of primary sources that examines the development of medieval society through the lens of how people perceived the devil. In exploring where and how Europeans discerned his presence, detected his machinations, and sought to counter his actions, readers will be afforded a new and important point of entry into medieval history.
Ghostly Landscapes:
Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture
By Patricia M. Keller
In Ghostly Landscapes, Patricia M. Keller analyses the aesthetics of haunting and the relationship between ideology and image production by revisiting twentieth-century Spanish history through the camera’s lens. Examining fascist documentary newsreels, countercultural art films from the Spanish New Wave, and conceptual landscape photographs created since the transition to democracy, Keller reveals how haunting serves to mourn loss, redefine space and history, and confirm the significance of lives and stories previously hidden or erased.
Speaking Spirits:
Ventriloquizing the Dead in Renaissance Italy
By Sherry Roush
In classical and early modern rhetoric, to write or speak using the voice of a dead individual is known as eidolopoeia. Whether through ghost stories, journeys to another world, or dream visions, Renaissance writers frequently used this rhetorical device not only to co-opt the authority of their predecessors but in order to express partisan or politically dangerous arguments. In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia.
Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic
By Katherine Bowers
In Russia, gothic fiction is often seen as an aside – a literary curiosity that experienced a brief heyday and then disappeared. Writing Fear explores Russian literature’s engagement with the gothic by analysing the practices of borrowing and adaptation. By mapping the myriad ways political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism, Writing Fear challenges the conventional literary history of nineteenth-century Russia.
