Over the last two decades, geographers have revealed how revenant narratives inscribed in the fabric of urban environments work to haunt cities and their inhabitants, emphasising the role of social (Degen and Hetherington 2001), historical (Till 2005), and affective (Pile 2005; Holloway 2010) encounters with the supernatural in city spaces. This shared interest in spectral or ‘spectro-geography’ (Maddern and Adey 2008) provides a geographical response to the broader ‘spectral turn’ within the humanities that began in the late twentieth century (Luckhurst 2002). Existing geographical studies analyse spectrality from a predominantly figurative perspective, while frequently overlooking the significance of the supernatural in the physical production of urban geographies. Taking a literary geographical approach to supernatural Tokyo, this article (per)forms an analytic ‘legend-trip’ of the Japanese metropolis, exposing the ways in which place, narrative, and folklore amalgamate to produce the city as an ‘interspatiality’ (Hones 2022).

Read Revenant narratives/literary hauntings: on the spectral geography of the Japanese metropolis

I examine subjective representations of time and space in elegy from the 17th century to the 21st century, focusing on how ordinary objects affect the elegiac environment. I argue that the defamiliarising of technological devices by the elegist creates uncanny sites of contact with the world of the dead. Using elegies by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, among others, I demonstrate a persistent motif of technological devices and scientific imagination in the genre. Stopping a clock interrupts the passage of time. Photographs create a static space where the past is present. The telephone allows connection to the dead. Studying the effects of these devices allows the interrogation of a critical narrative of shift from nature to science in the elegiac tradition, and the associated shift from healing to hopelessness, and emphasises the uncanny element of elegy and its impact on the space and time of mourning.

Read ‘Stop All The Clocks’: Elegy and Uncanny Technology