The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story

Abstract

Despite the immense popularity of ghost stories in the nineteenth century and their pervasiveness in the literary periodicals of the time, it appears we are today as unlikely to see new scholarship on the subject as we are to see an actual ghost. 1 This curious and persistent lack of scholarly interest, according to Julia Briggs, may in part be attributed to the elusive character of ghost fiction itself, a genre widely infamous for being "at once vast, amorphous, and notoriously difficult to define." 2 That the generic boundaries of ghost fiction, as Briggs finds, inevitably collapse upon closer scrutiny is, however, something that may equally be said about any literary genre—the nineteenth-century realist novel is arguably even more vast and amorphous than the ghost story, even more difficult to grasp as a unified textual body—nor has the increasingly prevalent argument for the fluidity of generic markers and arbitrariness of generic classification sufficed to discredit terminally the usefulness of genre theory, which has over the past couple of decades demonstrated its compatibility with the methods and practices of historically and culturally focused literary criticism. 3

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