Spectral Embodiments: Manifesting and Visualising the Ghost Child
This talk examines the transformation of the ghost-child figure from oral folklore and legends to their literary incarnations in Anglophone cultures of the long nineteenth century. They are mostly found as a small but concerted sub-genre of the emerging literary Ghost Story of this period, but also appear sporadically in elegies and in images from spectral photography to illustration. We will see how the ghost child of this period occupied a liminal space not only between life and afterlife, but between puritanical and liberal forms of Christianity, between images of innocence and sin, between pity and terror, between oral tradition and textual manifestation, and between the ethereal and the corporeal. (Please note that there may be a few images of real (historical) child death shown).
Bio
Dr Jen Baker is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests are childhood, death studies, the Gothic, short form and illustration from the late c18th to the present on which she has published a range of articles and chapters and is currently working on her monograph Spectral Embodiments: Anxious Manifestations of Child Death in the long c19th. She is compiler and editor of Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (2021) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.
Caption: Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, “The Lost Ghost”, Everybody’s Magazine, May 1903.
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