Uncanny Modernity

The uncanny is an experience of disorientation, of something disturbing, so that our ordinary world seems suddenly strange, eerie. We ask - where does the uncanny come from? Why has it become a favourite figure for our simultaneous experience of the present as homeless and the past as haunting? And could it be that the uncanny is a peculiarly modern experience?

Challenging conventional disciplinary boundaries, this wide-ranging and illuminating collection of essays by scholars in literary, film and cultural studies pursues these issues through the modern city, the night, gender, trauma, modernism, early cinema, the ghost film, contemporary fiction and terrorism. Opening up the debate beyond Freud, the essays suggest that the uncanny testifies to a distinctive sensibility, calling for a cultural aesthetics of the modern experience, while inevitably subverting the serene confidence of any explanatory framework that seeks to capture it.

JO COLLINS is Teaching Assistant in Cultural Studies in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Kent.

JOHN JERVIS is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent.