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Overview
Ghosts - dead and yet alive, absent and yet present - are able to cross the borders of experience; in literature their evocation has been enduringly important. In Henry James and the Ghostly Dr Lustig explores the ghost stories that James produced throughout his career and relates them to the great dynamic forces which may well represent James's most original contribution to literature. The centrepiece of the book is a detailed analysis of James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, set in the context of work by earlier Victorian writers, and developments in James's own treatment of the ghostly. Dr Lustig evaluates the ghostly charge attached to the many scenes in James's novels and tales which turn on thresholds, perspectives, windows and doors, and the many moments when James's characters seem almost to encounter the margins of the texts which enclose them.