Catherine Belsey: Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

• Maria Fleischhack

Catherine Belsey’s Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History is an engaging and entertaining read. Basing her discussion of ghosts and ghost stories on a multitude of literary examples, Belsey offers a wealth of intertextual and transcultural references and discussion points. Moving effortlessly, sometimes too much so, through the ages and different cultural circles, the book focuses mostly on European ghosts – from Homer via the Renaissance, from the Enlightenment to the Victorian Age, and ending with contemporary examples from literature and cinema.
The book consists of ten chapters, a prelude and a coda, which are each once again broken down into smaller topics, each encompassing a more specific discussion of the larger topic of each respective chapter.