In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Mar簿聶翻a del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different
landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere
for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development.
The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its
chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jos簿聶翻 Mart簿聶翻, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hern簿聶翻ndez, and Clint Eastwood. In an
intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as
a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
