Hauntology

By: Merlin Coverley

Narrated by: Alan Turton

Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from, and what exactly does it mean?

This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artefacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

©2020 Merlin Coverley (P)2020 W F Howes

Annoying Accents: too distracting & incorrect

Would have been a great listen without caricatured accents: unlistenable at points. Sloppy, unnecessary.

Great book and narrator — except for the accents

A sprightly and clear narration of an excellent survey of Hauntology. Too bad about the accents though — as other reviewers have mentioned, they’re beyond caricature.

Great book; not the best narrator

The book is great and the narrator is normally pretty good. But he chooses to do accents for quotes in the book. Even when he correctly identifies the accent he should be using (German for Marx, etc.), he isn’t great. But he often misidentifies people. For instance, he reads quotes from Vernon Lee (an English woman) in a terrible French accent for some reason. Many examples of this and some border on the offensive