This introduction takes as its central armature Karen Barad’s agential realism to provide a framework for understanding the essays brought together in this Special Issue under the rubric of pictures of conflict. The intention is to move the dis...
This essay reads Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” as folk horror about the late-Victorian spiritualist debates. We read Allen’s story as not only sympathetic to spiritualism, but also as critical of the gendered and genred...
In the Netherlands, there was always a clear distinction between Protestant and Catholic folklore. That is visible in witchcraft accusations, but it is also visible in ghost lore. This lore is here reconstructed applying a not always used source, to...
This paper examines Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1883 story The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ in light of his later intersecting interests in spiritualism and masculinity. Conan Doyle uses the Arctic as a space where scientific and spiritual w...
Hitherto unnoticed similarities between two short stories by Gustav Meyrink and two of the most renowned and widely read ghost stories of M.R. James are detailed through comparative literary analysis. Specifically, one early occult horror tale of Mey...
The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” of the Exeter Book reveals a long process of creating intelligibility and order out of a complicated and obscure manuscript context. Understanding t...
Australian author Michelle de Kretser addresses in her literary work ideas of home and belonging. In Springtime. A Ghost Story (2014) the author gives voice to an ambiguous and variable subject who coexists with her past, present and future, inhabiti...
Bleeding is a rare but serious complication of pancreatitis, significantly increasing morbidity and mortality. It can arise from various sources, including erosion of blood vessels by inflammatory processes, formation of pseudoaneurysms, and gastroin...
This essay examines the placement and displacement of Nahua labor in the architectural history of Mexico’s early colonial monasteries. It takes as its point of departure the story of a ghost in the Tlaxcala monastery as told by a Franciscan mis...
Under the influence of Freud’s dream analysis, Benjamin writes down a dream about Goethe’s house, which he has visited before and in whose visitor’s book he finds his name ‘already entered in big, unruly, childish scrawl’ and at whose dinner table he...
This paper reviews Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in the context of the social and cultural changes of the metropolis Paris at the end of the 19th century. The Phantom of the Opera, a success in the literary world and widely proliferated in its...
In at least two aspects, Buddhist Avadāna literature shares a strong affinity with Chinese literature. One type of stories can be seen as parallel tales that bear striking resemblances to Chinese tales, while the other type has been assimilated...
An overview is given of how beetles are utilised, perceived, and experienced in daily life across sub-Saharan Africa. More than 300 people from 27 countries were interviewed and the results were compared with literature findings. Both the adults and...
Belief in the existence of spiritual entities is an integral part of many people’s religious worldview. Angels appear, demons possess, ghosts haunt. But is belief that such entities exist justified? If not, are there conditions in which it woul...
A striking difference between the folk-narrative genres of legend and folktale is how the human characters respond to supernatural, otherworldly, or uncanny beings such as ghosts, gods, dwarves, giants, trolls, talking animals, witches, and fairies....
The literary career of Lettice Galbraith (1859–1932) coincided with a transformative period in British intellectual history, when the boundaries between scientific rationalism and occult epistemologies were being vigorously contested. This pape...
In this experimental text that critically juxtaposes autoethnographic narration, reflection, and analysis with theoretical engagements, I suggest that the power dynamics that diminish and dispossess the lives of refugees and other displaced people al...
Conformal symmetry always played an important role in field theory (both quantum and classical) and in gravity. We present construction of quantum conformal gravity and discuss its features regarding scattering amplitudes and quantum effective action...
Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around songlines: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borr...
This essay offers a first critical reading of American author Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s short story “The Warlock’s Shadow” (1886), asserting that the tale appropriates historical traumas in order to navigate, and transgre...
This study analyzes the award-winning documentary film Searching for Rodakis, directed by Kerem Soyyilmaz, produced in 2023. The aim of this study is the historic comprehension and analysis of this filmic narrative in the field of social–semiot...