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Ghostly Alterities analyses the meaning of ghostliness in contemporary Anglophone novels – Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2002), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995) – in which the figure of the ghost is often entrusted with the task of questioning Western culture and history. After an introductory chapter which investigates Freud’s concept of the uncanny along with theoretical issues raised by Iain Chambers and Jacques Derrida, Ghostly Alterities discusses the novels from different critical orientations (postcolonialism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), presenting ghostliness as intersecting with three major themes: the problem of the spectre’s visibility and “bodily” nature; the particular melancholic state of mind the ghost can trigger which brings about a very special kind of (g)hospitality; the spectral nature of history and its relationship with the characters’ personal memory.

Renaissance England was marked by a pervasive culture of courtesy. The research hypothesis of this book is that verbal courtesy , for historical and social reasons involving social mobility and the crisis produced by the clash between different systems of thought (Humanism, Catholicism, Protestantism, new scientific discourses), soon became strategic language , characterised by specific forms of facework detectable through the patterns of politeness and impoliteness employed by speakers. Adopting a historical pragmatic perspective, Using the Devil with Courtesy semantically and conceptually connects courtesy and (im)politeness to analyse Renaissance forms of (im)politeness through Shakespeare. Drawing on a methodological line of research running from Goffman (1967) and Grice (1967), to Brown and Levinson (1987), Jucker (2010) and Culpeper (2011), the book focuses specifically on Hamlet (c. 1601) and The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594) with three principal aims: 1) to survey the (im)polite strategies used by the characters; 2) to explore how this language connects to a specific Renaissance subjectivity; 3) to link language and subjectivity to extra-textual (historical and semiotic) factors.