"The True, Old-Fashioned, Foretelling, Flitting, Gliding Ghost": The Aesthetics of Ghost-Belief and Mary Shelley's Necromantic Practice of Mourning

Abstract:This article explores Mary Shelley's aesthetics of ghost-belief, as articulated in her 1824 essay "On Ghosts," and her private journals and correspondence. It argues that Shelley posits a phenomenological model of ghost-belief that frames belief as contingent, fluid, and simultaneously shaped and revealed by aesthetic and affective responses. Shelley's understanding of ghost-belief as a latent experiential possibility frequently occluded and inhibited by the epistemic habits of modernity is, the article contends, crucial to her larger literary project of mourning, as it enables a hermeneutic practice that reads texts and experiences as potential loci for the presence of the dead.