Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Various ghosts have haunted this special topic. Caroline Weber's essay conjures the ghosts of slaves in Denis Diderot's Le fils naturel. Kari Lokke explores the way Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand deploy tales of contact with the spirits of the dead to probe a nation's political unconscious, enlisting the dead to galvanize the present into revolutionary action. For Todd Samuel Presner, Hegel's grand sweep of world history is haunted by the ghosts of Jews written out of that history. That PMLA in its special topics has not always wanted to listen to the Spirit of Literature Past is unsurprising, for the desire to listen to history's ghosts is by no means universal.