‘This is a story-telling age’: Spectral Nostalgia in Bracebridge Hall

In his historical folk tales, Washington Irving makes colonial male characters ghostly by connecting them to the ‘vanishing Indian’ disappearing across the early nation. This chapter argues that Irving employs liminal White figures marked by spectral indigeneity to enshrine a colonial vision of hierarchical yet interdependent community and citizenship, itself vanishing in the early national period. Bracebridge Hall’s spectral men are relics of a past America, who protest the increasing professionalisation of White male citizens and the destruction of colonial communal structures. In his intertwined tales of colonial America and Georgian England, Irving is involved in a project of ‘spectral nostalgia’, reproducing scenes of supernatural storytelling and ghost stories as a means of rescuing and propagating these fading civic structures of relation and feeling.