This study is of the uncanny; an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The Uncanny" (Das Unheimliche). Where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, deja-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness", the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness, as well as more "applied" readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film and religion.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations List of illustrations 1. The uncanny: an introduction 2. Supplement: 'The sandman' 3. Literature, teaching, psychoanalysis 4. Film 5. The death drive 6. Silence, solitude and... 7. Darkness 8. Night writing 9. Inexplicable 10. Buried alive 11. Deja vu 12. The double 13. Chance encounter 14. Cannibalism 15. Manifestations of insanity 16. A crowded after-life 17. To be announced 18. Mole 19. The 'telepathy effect' 20. Phantom text 21. The private parts of Jesus Christ 22. Book end The uncanny: a bibliography

About the Author

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex