Title: Ghost-watching American modernity
Description: In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Mar̕a del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development.

The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Još Marť, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Herǹndez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
Subjects: Nationalism in literature, Landscapes in literature, History and criticism, American literature, Ghosts in literature, Haunted places, Spanish American literature, Comparative literature, Latin American and American, American and Latin American, Literary, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Comparative literature, american and latin american, American literature, history and criticism, 19th century, American literature, history and criticism, 20th century
Time periods: 20th century, 19th century