cover image HALLOWEEN: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night

HALLOWEEN: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night

Nicholas Rogers, . . Oxford Univ., $23 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-19-514691-2

"Coming to Canada in my early twenties, I was bewildered by Halloween, a North American festival about which I knew nothing," writes Rogers, originally from the English West Country and now professor of history at Toronto's York University. In addition to covering much of the same ground as Skal, Rogers argues that in the 19th century "Halloween's capacity to provide a public space for social inversion and other transgression held it in good stead at a time when other potentially raucous holidays were becoming more institutionalized and domesticated." While Rogers shows that Halloween eventually met the same commercial fate as other U.S. holidays, it still provides a modicum of transgression. He covers the many forms those transgressions have taken, ending, like Skal, with Halloween 2001, when "U.S. citizens abandoned gore for more patriotic motifs." (Oct.)