Russell, ShannonGeoghegan, ElizabethHartway, Elora2024-10-172024-10-172019Hartway, Elora. "The Evolution of the Haunted House: Spatial Anxieties in American and English Ghost Stories". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2019.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/514Thesis (B.A. in English Literature, Minor in Creative Writing)--John Cabot University, Spring 2019.This thesis explores the concept of spatial anxiety in American and English ghost stories from the 19th century to the 21st century. The five selected ghost stories are Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, MR James’s “Number 13”, Stephen King’s The Shining, and the communal online story of “Slender Man.” With each ghost story, the manifestations of spatial anxiety change as the physical appearance of the haunted house setting changes. The psychological landscape of each ghost story fluctuates with the historical moment; each story draws on contemporary anxieties, which this thesis will locate by tracking the development of the appearance and function of the haunted house over time in both American and English ghost stories. A psychological approach is taken in this analysis, though historical contextualization is necessary to understand not just the evolving function and appearance of the haunted house in these five selected ghost stories, but also the sociopolitical motivators that contributed to each change. Through the five ghost stories of this thesis, I identify a progressive increase of activity and agency in the haunted space that corresponds to an increase of supernatural qualities within the physical haunted space.113 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Ghost storiesHenry James, 1843-1916Turn of the screw (Henry James)Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900The Canterville ghost (Oscar Wilde)Stephen King, 1947-Shining (Stephen King)Slender Man (Legendary character)M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James, 1862-1936Number 13 (James Montague Rhodes)Thesis