Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions, a new book by the chair of York’s Department of English, Art Redding, will launch next Wednesday.

Published by the University of Alabama Press, Haints (see YFile, Sept. 14) examines the work of contemporary American authors who draw on the gothic tradition in their fiction, not as frivolous or supernatural entertainments, but to explore and memorialize the ghosts of their heritage.

The launch will take place Oct. 26, from 3 to 5pm, in the Founders Senior Common Room, 305 Founders College, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend. Refreshments will be provided.

Ghosts, Redding argues, serve as lasting witnesses to the legacies of slaves and indigenous peoples whose stories were lost in the remembrance or mistranslation of history. No matter how much Americans willingly or unwillingly repress the truth of their ancestry, their ghosts remain unburied and restless.

Left: Art Redding

Redding, a professor in York’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, currently teaches Contemporary American Gothic. He has written about various American literary and cultural figures, from Emma Goldman to Kathy Acker. He is the author of Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (University Press of Mississippi, 2008) and Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence (University of South Carolina Press, 1998).

The event is sponsored by the York University Bookstore and Founders College.

Republished courtesy of YFile– York University’s daily e-bulletin.