Literary Geography and the Ghost Story: Haunting, Narrative, and Spatiality in Lucy M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe
摘要
Applying the literary geographical concept of interspatiality (Hones, 2022) to the study of Lucy Boston’s 1954 novella, The Children of Green Knowe, this chapter explores how the boundaries between the “actual” and the “imagined” blur, distort, and collapse in the reading of ghost stories. The indivisibility of literary/actual-world space considered in this examination of Boston’s work suggests that spectral narratives depend on an amalgamation of intra- and extra-textual space rather than a dividing of these perceived spatial spheres. Considering the interspatiality of the literary ghost story brings to light the specific ways in which ghost stories operate geographically, enabling a better understanding of the affective spatial encounters performed and generated within, between, and beyond individual texts.