The Uncanny

Freud was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. The uncanny is an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Offers a detailed historical 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 the death drive, deja-vu, ‘silence, solitude and darkness’, the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannabilism, telepathy and madness, as well as more ‘applied’ readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film, and religion.