Haunted narratives: politics, fiction and ghostwriting in Robert Harris’s "The Ghost"

Taking as case study Robert Harris’s The Ghost, and focusing on the ‘poetics’ of ghostwriting and multiple, disseminated authorship, this article aims to highlight the crucial intersections between truth and fiction, authenticity and self-deception and the disembodying of public accountability from both the political subject and the literary author, made possible by the emergence of professional speechwriters and celebrity politicians. Suggestively embedded in this subtly intertextual novel are a number of ‘Gothic’ narrative structures and generic conventions, which range from the thematization of ghostwriting as a spectral activity, to the pervasive use of terms and images pertaining to the semantic areas of “haunting” and “the ghostly”, to neo-Gothic rewritings of landscapes and social milieus.