Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781783274413)

Supernatural Cities challenges the assumption that supernatural beliefs and practices faded under the dual impact of urbanisation and modernisation. Our contemporary cultural fascination with the urban supernatural, urban legends and urban-based fantasy would bely this inherited view of disenchantment, yet supernatural cultures in urban environments have mostly been ignored by scholars.
This edited collection presents a rich cultural history of the complex relationship between supernatural beliefs and practices, imagination and storytelling, and urbanisation. Grouped around themes of enchantment, anxiety and spectrality, it takes a broad chronological and geographical approach, exploring urban supernatural cultures on five continents between the late eighteenth century and the present day. With contributions from historians, geographers, anthropologists, folklorists and literary scholars, the book advances a ground-breaking international and multidisciplinary exploration of the communal and cultural function of urban supernatural ideas, beliefs and narratives. It demonstrates how the supernatural, far from being a static or eroding cultural inheritance from the past, has continually been appropriated and updated to accommodate and express the social, cultural, economic and environmental anxieties of the particular urban setting in which they have manifested. By drawing together a diverse range of academic approaches, the book seeks to pioneer a field ripe with interdisciplinary potential and makes an important contribution to our understanding of how urban environments, both past and present, inform our imaginations, cultural insecurities and spatial fears.

KARL BELL is Reader in Cultural and Social History at the University of Portsmouth.

CONTRIBUTORS: Karl Bell, Oliver Betts, Alex Bevan, Tracy Fahey, Deirdre Flynn, Maria del Pilar Blanco, William Pooley, Elena Pryamikova, David J. Puglia, William Redwood, Morag Rose, Alevtina Solovyova, Tom Sykes, Natalya Veselkova, Mikhail Vandyshev, David Waldron, Sharn Waldron, Felicity Wood