for better understanding the periods through which their stories arewoven” (179). However, he fails to fully mine what they mightreveal about the nostalgic impulses of the 1990s and the context andpolitics of their time production, as opposed to their temporal set-ting.

Goldman writes with a warm enthusiasm for the films he hasselected and has amassed a great deal of research. Often signpostingthe importance of close reading and the theoretical underpinnings ofthe practice of film history, Goldman’s project is accessible for eventhose unaccustomed to approaching film. Despite some oversights,The America Jewish Story Through Film is a useful examination of boththe motivations and work of several filmmakers who, althoughdistinct, share a broadly similar take on the American Jewishexperience.

Hannah GravesUniversity of Warwick

The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: SpectralIdentities. Lisa Kr€oger and Melanie Anderson. Newark: Univer-sity of Delaware Press, 2013. 168 pp. $65.00 cloth.

The misty-gray colored entity floating through walls does nothave to have a physical presence to haunt you, at least according tothe chapters in Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson’s compilation,The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities.Presently, Lisa Kroger holds a lecturer position at Mississippi StateUniversity, and Melanie R. Anderson is an assistant professor ofAmerican Literature at the University of Mississippi. Their collectiontakes a multigenre, multimodal approach to “haunting” figures,expanding their definition of what it means to be a ghost across vari-ous historical periods and exploring how the narrative and modeitself participate in “ghosting.” The book breaks down into threemajor subheadings: “The Gothic and the Ghostly,” “Spectral Figuresand Spectral Histories,” and “Spectral Projections,” each of whichconnects to the ghosted through various realms, creating a wideraudience for the book that could include interdisciplinary scholars inhorror, Gothic, and even contemporary literature and film.

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The editors want to redefine the concept of ghosts to represent“ambiguity” and “the ineffable,” suggesting that “using the meta-phor of the the ghost [to represent the] silenced, marginalized, andsuppressed” characters in many of the texts that the collection exam-ines happens across various literary periods and film genres (xii).Thus, the entire volume revolves around a type of “social ghosting”in which culture and societal norms enhance the nature of the ghost.Suggesting that the ghosts appear more broad and less physical innature, the book even examines how the text as an artifact can havethemes of the ghosted or can be a ghost itself.

The first section, “The Gothic and the Ghostly,” takes the Gothicrevival and establishes the use of ghostly tropes as a reference to painin various British and American works between the eighteenth andtwentieth centuries. Using the ghosted as a trope, these three chap-ters explore larger themes of history and culture. Part II, “SpectralFigures and Spectral Histories,” closely examines the relationshipbetween ghosts and the “reconstruction of memory and history.”These chapters cover more contemporary literature within the con-text of identity, exploring how certain characters in Atonement, Whiteis for Witching, Geographies of Home and Soledad, and Vixen hauntthemselves and others through social ghosting and rewrite their ownhistories and memories. The final section, “Spectral Projections,”investigates how the texts, specifically films, can be ghosts thathaunt the audience, likening the visual productions of film to thephysical representations of ghosts. Identifying the haunting relation-ship between certain horror films and their audience, the final sectionconsiders a larger, global context for their interpretations,

For scholars in the field, the book sets precedent for perceivingghosts that are not necessarily present, remaining a great text forliterary and film researchers interested in the way “ghosting” affectsindividual and collective histories and memories. The rhetoricalnature of many of the chapters allows those interested in ghostingwithin the humanities to connect their texts with history. Thebook expands the circumference of primary texts than can belabeled as “ghostly,” creating new pathways for scholars to findnew and old texts that would not necessarily fit into the Gothictradition but would still maintain characteristics of ghosting, thusshowing how ghosts expand outside of the framework of Gothicand horror texts.

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The way the editors weave the broad scope of the ghosted intotheir collection allows this book to be a great tool for those inter-ested in interdisciplinary studies, as the individual chapters utilize abroad range of the Gothic, ghosts, literature, and film. However, theanalyzed texts remain very specific, though broad, to certain canonsand genres (such as Korean horror films and early Gothic fiction).Therefore, though the various articles would be great resources forinterpreting the specific texts analyzed in the collection, they maynot always have obvious segues into other fictional ghosting tales,except for the methodology and heuristics presented in each chapterand section. Many of the chapters rhetorically analyze how social andauthorial contexts (historical mostly) inform the ghosted narrativesas well. Overall, I highly recommend this text as a new and excitingparadigm for understanding how societies perceive the ghosted, andit would be a great text for courses involving Gothic literature andhorror films.

James Chase SanchezTexas Christian University

Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture.Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick. New York:Modern Language Association, 2010. 360 pp. $25.00 paper-back.

Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick’s Teaching Ital-ian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture is an excellently con-ceived group of pedagogical essays. The textbook focuses on answeringthe question: “where is Italian American literature?” (3). Though thisproblem is given the most attention in the introduction, the scope ofthe book encompasses the analysis of cultural texts and artifacts includ-ing “three examples of recovered Italian American history” (4), ItalianAmerican film and television, and other examples of Italian Americanculture. The book also contains a beneficial “Review of Anthologies forTeaching Italian American Studies” (297) that functions as anexcellent bibliographic tool for further research. In short, TeachingItalian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture cogently organizesand explains various pedagogical aspects of Italian American culture.

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