WHAT IS A CHRONOTAPE?

[rashore]

I came across a review for this book, and thought it was interesting sounding.

Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (Eds.). Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016

Quote

Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment is a collection of essays concerning the interaction between what we think about ghosts and what we mean by a ghostly location or landscape. It consists of twelve essays ranging from Heidegger to W.G.Sebald and the Whitechapel London of Jack the Ripper to the shadowy landscape of Anglo-Scots borders. The introduction contains a vivid description of ghostliness written by Vernon Lee in 1898.

 

“Ghosts and ghostly things are things of the imagination, born there, sprung from the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections of fragmentary vivid impressions, litter of multi-coloured tatters, and faded herbs and flowers, whence arises that odour (we all know it), musty and damp, but penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air when a ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering flames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.”

 

Lee’s Victorian prose is a little over-wrought but engaging as she draws us in to explore a ghostly terrain. Unfortunately two thirds of the twenty first century academics gathered here, never write with such colour. Too often their style, and therefore sense, falls into grey high dense jargon.

http://pelicanist.blogspot.com/2017/01/what-is-chronotape.html