The Victorian Supernatural

by Nicola Bown (Editor), Carolyn Burdett (Editor), Pamela Thurschwell (Editor)

Overview

This collection brings together essays by scholars from literature, history of art and history of science which explore the diversity of Victorian fascination with the supernatural: ghosts and fairies, table-rappings and telepathic encounters, occult religions and the idea of reincarnation, visions of the other world and a reality beyond the everyday. These essays demonstrate that the supernatural was not simply a reaction to the "post-Darwinian loss of faith", but was embedded in virtually every aspect of Victorian culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521810159
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/05/2004
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #42
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.37(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Nicola Bown teaches Victorian literature and art at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge, 2001).

Carolyn Burdett is Principal Lecturer in English at London Metropolitan University. She is the author of Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (2000).

Pamela Thurschwell is a lecturer in English at University College London, She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking 1880-1920 (2001) and Sigmund Freud (2000).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Foreward Gillian Beer; Part I. Supernatural Science: 1. Spiritualism, science and the supernatural in mid-Victorian Britain Richard Noakes; 2. Investigations and fictions: Charles Dickens and ghosts Louise Henson; Part II. Invisible Women: 3. Spectral politics: the Victorian ghost story and the domestic servant Eve M. Lynch; 4. George Eliot's prophecies: coercive second sight and everyday thought reading Pamela Thurschwell; Part III. Raising the Dead: 5. Browning, the dramatic monologue and the resuscitation of the dead Adam Roberts; 6. Baron Corvo and the key to the underworld Colin Cruise; Part IV. Envisioning the Unseen: 7. What is the stuff that dreams are made of? Nicola Bown; 8. Holman Hunt, William Dyce and the image of Christ Michaela Giebelhausen; Part V. Imperial Occult: 9. Knowledge, belief and the supernatural at the imperial margin Roger Luckhurst; 10. Romance, reincarnation and Rider Haggard Carolyn Burdett; Part VI. Haunted modernism: 11. The origins of modernism in the haunted properties of literature Geoffrey Gilbert; 12. Afterword Steven Connor; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...this volume has something for everyone." B.F. Fisher, University of Mississippi, Choice

From the Publisher