Introduction: Even the Dead Will Not Be Safe

Abstract

This book is mostly about the form of modern ghost stories, rather than their content. But these can only be separated in an abstract sense, and working out the stories’ form, at different historical moments, will require paying attention to their content as well. At the level of content, ghost stories repetitively address a set of socio-historical concerns that we need to take into account before we can really extrapolate from them anything significant about form. Thus, I am going to take a few pages now to explore and explain those socio-historical concerns, and some of the ways the modern English ghost story addresses them. I will also explain something of what each of these terms — ‘modern,’ and ‘English,’ and ‘ghost story,’ as well as ‘history’ — mean, in the context of this book.KeywordsOpen DoorRealist ProjectReading PracticeBritish EmpireClass MobilityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.