The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction is a rigorous critical survey of ghostly, occult, and uncanny elements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English literature. Scarborough traces how Gothic conventions survive and transform in modern fiction, examining apparitions, second sight, psychic influence, demonic presences, and haunted psychology. Her style is scholarly yet lively, combining literary taxonomy with close attention to atmosphere, narrative method, and cultural belief. Dorothy Scarborough was unusually equipped for such a study. An American scholar, novelist, folklorist, and teacher associated with Columbia University, she brought academic discipline together with a deep imaginative sympathy for popular legend and supernatural tradition. Her later work collecting folklore and writing fiction about social and regional life reveals the same interest in how stories preserve communal fears, desires, and moral tensions. Readers interested in Gothic fiction, supernatural literature, or the intellectual history of the uncanny will find this book both useful and suggestive. Though written in an earlier critical idiom, it remains valuable for its breadth, clarity, and historical perspective. Scarborough offers not merely a catalogue of strange tales, but a thoughtful account of why modern fiction continued to need ghosts.