The uncanny: An introduction

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's extraordinary essay of 1919, 'The Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche). Above all, Freud was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious, but strangely familiar.

As a ghostly feeling and concept, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers a detailed account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on literature, teaching, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, film, the death drive, d j vu, silence, solitude and darkness, the fear of being buried alive, the double, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, madness and religion.