The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult PDF Download

Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138109636
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 454

View

Book Description
Pt. 1. Haunted laboratories and ghosts in the machine : spiritualism, science and technology -- pt. 2. Occulture : sex, politics, philosophy and poetics -- pt. 3. Staging the Victorian afterlife : from magic shows to dinner parties.

Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317042271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 553

View

Book Description
Critical attention to the Victorian supernatural has flourished over the last twenty-five years. Whether it is spiritualism or Theosophy, mesmerism or the occult, the dozens of book-length studies and hundreds of articles that have appeared recently reflect the avid scholarly discussion of Victorian mystical practices. Designed both for those new to the field and for experts, this volume is organized into sections covering the relationship between Victorian spiritualism and science, the occult and politics, and the culture of mystical practices. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult brings together some of the most prominent scholars working in the field to introduce current approaches to the study of nineteenth-century mysticism and to define new areas for research.

Author: John Holmes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317042344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479

View

Book Description
Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

Author: Nan Goodman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317042964
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 522

View

Book Description
Nineteenth-century America witnessed some of the most important and fruitful areas of intersection between the law and humanities, as people began to realize that the law, formerly confined to courts and lawyers, might also find expression in a variety of ostensibly non-legal areas such as painting, poetry, fiction, and sculpture. Bringing together leading researchers from law schools and humanities departments, this Companion touches on regulatory, statutory, and common law in nineteenth-century America and encompasses judges, lawyers, legislators, litigants, and the institutions they inhabited (courts, firms, prisons). It will serve as a reference for specific information on a variety of law- and humanities-related topics as well as a guide to understanding how the two disciplines developed in tandem in the long nineteenth century.

Author: John Bliss
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527520390
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

View

Book Description
This book focuses on the representation of the practitioner of the occult in mid to late nineteenth-century British literature. The occult was a source of emotional support and scientific curiosity during this time of change and uncertainty because it seemed to offer answers to both spiritual and scientific questions through measurable, albeit unconventional, means. However, the occult was also viewed as a threat to British society, an assault on it values, and a fundamental danger to emerging scientific enterprise. By examining the ways in which the occult and its practitioners are represented in British novels from 1850-1900, this book traces the ways that the novels commented on, participated in, and contributed to the racialization of the occult that occurred throughout the nineteenth century in Britain. The representations of the occult characters in these novels interpreted and transmitted the social, political, economic, and scientific discourses about race in the nineteenth century to the reading public, as well as participating in the discourse surrounding race and the occult.

Author: Lucy Arnold
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350072575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

View

Book Description
From the ghosts which reside in Midlands council houses in Every Day is Mother's Day to the resurrected historical dead of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the writings of Hilary Mantel are often haunted by supernatural figures. One of the first book-length studies of the writer's work, Reading Hilary Mantel explores the importance of ghosts in the full range of her fiction and non-fiction writing and their political, social and ethical resonances. Combining material from original interviews with the author herself with psychoanalytic, historicist and deconstructivist critical perspectives, Reading Hilary Mantel is a landmark study of this important and popular contemporary novelist.

Author: Clive Bloom
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030408663
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 867

View

Book Description
By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.

Author: Sarah Bartels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000348040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

View

Book Description
In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.

Author: Courtenay Raia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663549X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 443

View

Book Description
The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.

Author: Elsa Richardson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137519703
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

View

Book Description
This book explores the phenomenon of second sight in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Second sight is a form of prophetic vision associated with the folklore of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, those in possession of this extraordinary power are said to foresee future events like the death of neighbour, the arrival of strangers into the community, the success or failure of a fishing trip. From the late seventeenth century onwards, rumours of this strange faculty attracted the attention of numerous scientists, travel writers, antiquarians, poets and artists. Focusing on the nineteenth century, this book examines second sight in relation to mesmerism and phrenology, modern spiritualism and anthropology, romance literature and folklorism and finally, psychical research and Celtic mysticism. Tracing the migration of a supposedly ‘Scottish’ tradition through various sites of nineteenth-century popular culture, it explores questions of nationhood and identity alongside those posed by supernatural phenomena.