Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139485881
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

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Book Synopsis Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists by : Srdjan Smajić

Download or read book Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists written by Srdjan Smajić and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we 'see' is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.

The Sympathetic Medium

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801457386
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sympathetic Medium by : Jill Galvan

Download or read book The Sympathetic Medium written by Jill Galvan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with séances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted—in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in séance parlors—by women. In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers a richly nuanced and culturally grounded analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the century. Examining a wide variety of fictional explorations of feminine channeling (in both the technological and supernatural realms) by such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and George Du Maurier, Galvan argues that women were often chosen for that role, or assumed it themselves, because they made at-a-distance dialogues seem more intimate, less mediated. Two allegedly feminine traits, sympathy and a susceptibility to automatism, enabled women to disappear into their roles as message-carriers.Anchoring her literary analysis in discussions of social, economic, and scientific culture, Galvan finds that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of mediated communication reveals the challenges that the new networked culture presented to prevailing ideas of gender, dialogue, privacy, and the relationship between body and self.

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271090464
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis How Sherlock Pulled the Trick by : Brian McCuskey

Download or read book How Sherlock Pulled the Trick written by Brian McCuskey and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful combination of literary study and author biography, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick guides us through the parallel careers of two inseparable men: Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Reconsidering Holmes in light of Doyle’s well-known belief in Victorian spiritualism, Brian McCuskey argues that the so-called scientific detective follows the same circular logic, along the same trail of questionable evidence, that led Doyle to the séance room. Holmes’s first case, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887, when natural scientists and religious apologists were hotly debating their differences in the London press. In this environment, Doyle became convinced that spiritualism, as a universal faith based on material evidence, resolved the conflict between science and religion. The character of Holmes, with his infallible logic, was Doyle’s good faith solution to the cultural conflicts of his day. Yet this solution has evolved into a new problem. Sherlock Holmes now authorizes the pseudoscience that corrupts our public sphere, defying logic, revising history, and promoting conspiracy theories. As this book demonstrates, wearing a deerstalker does not make you a mastermind—more likely, it marks you as a crackpot. Fascinating and highly readable, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick returns the iconic Holmes to his mystical origins.

Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501398091
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing by : Nimi Wariboko

Download or read book Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing written by Nimi Wariboko and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-01-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing is the first book to bring rigorous literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse together to interrogate the ethics of governance and development in postcolonial Africa. It takes literature seriously as a context for philosophical reflection, vividly engaging the human agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of local Nigerians as political and social actors and shedding new light on the dynamics of human flourishing. Drawing on important secondary scholarship across several humanities disciplines, especially literature, philosophy, and the performing arts, Nimi Wariboko provides compelling and innovative analysis of the challenges and opportunities on governance and development in postcolonial Nigerian state and society. With a detailed introductory chapter and an authoritative analysis contained in six cohesive chapters, all anchored in political and social ethics and close readings of fascinating literary and artistic works-such as A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass and the comedy skits of MC Edo Pikin-this is a landmark contribution to Nigerian cultural studies. Wariboko's practical engagement between literature and philosophy also opens up new ways of seeing literary analysis as ethical methodology, beyond the specific contexts of Nigeria or Africa.

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030326527
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (33 download)

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Book Synopsis Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by : Emily Alder

Download or read book Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle written by Emily Alder and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.

Strange Science

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Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472900773
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (729 download)

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Book Synopsis Strange Science by : Lara Pauline Karpenko

Download or read book Strange Science written by Lara Pauline Karpenko and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in Strange Science examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society. To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. Strange Science takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, cultural studies, the history of the body, and the history of science.

The Devil and the Victorians

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000348040
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis The Devil and the Victorians by : Sarah Bartels

Download or read book The Devil and the Victorians written by Sarah Bartels and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000173232
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics by : Ruth Heholt

Download or read book Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics written by Ruth Heholt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing is prescient. Best known today for her collection of "real" ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: or of Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works cover the Newgate genre, help to initiate detective fiction, include elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and point the way to the sensation novels of the 1860s. Politically radical in many ways Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights. This volume aims to restore an author who was "[o]nce as famous as Dickens or Thackeray" (Wilson 1986, v) to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature.

The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317288939
Total Pages : 684 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story by : Scott Brewster

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story written by Scott Brewster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centring on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.

Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031398963
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (313 download)

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Book Synopsis Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by : Melissa Rampelli

Download or read book Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel written by Melissa Rampelli and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel looks extensively at hysteria discourse through medical and sociological texts and examines how this body of work intersects with important cultural debates to define women’s social, physical, and mental health. The book sketches out prominent shifts in cultural reactions to the idea of diffused agency and the prized model of the interiorized, individual person capable of self will and governance. Melissa Rampelli takes up the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, showing how the authors play with and manipulate stock literary figures to contribute to this dialogue about the causes and cures of women’s hysterical distress.

Cinematic Ghosts

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 162892215X
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (289 download)

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Book Synopsis Cinematic Ghosts by : Murray Leeder

Download or read book Cinematic Ghosts written by Murray Leeder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1896, Maxim Gorky declared cinema "the Kingdom of Shadows." In its silent, ashen-grey world, he saw a land of spectral, and ever since then cinema has had a special relationship with the haunted and the ghostly. Cinematic Ghosts is the first collection devoted to this subject, including fourteen new essays, dedicated to exploring the many permutations of the movies' phantoms. Cinematic Ghosts contains essays revisiting some classic ghost films within the genres of horror (The Haunting, 1963), romance (Portrait of Jennie, 1948), comedy (Beetlejuice, 1988) and the art film (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010), as well as essays dealing with a number of films from around the world, from Sweden to China. Cinematic Ghosts traces the archetype of the cinematic ghost from the silent era until today, offering analyses from a range of historical, aesthetic and theoretical dimensions.

Worlds Enough

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691227810
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Worlds Enough by : Elaine Freedgood

Download or read book Worlds Enough written by Elaine Freedgood and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fiction Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. She analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. She concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, Worlds Enough suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance

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Publisher : Victorian Secrets
ISBN 13 : 1906469261
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (64 download)

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Book Synopsis Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance by : Georgiana Houghton

Download or read book Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance written by Georgiana Houghton and published by Victorian Secrets. This book was released on 2013 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the years 1870-1881, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance (Second Series ) documents the everyday, yet astonishing, experiences of spirit activity within the domestic space of the Victorian parlour. Through the intimacy of her diary-like prose, Houghton conjures cosy images of spirits laying the table for tea in what she called the "interblending of the heavenly and the mundane." She is equally comfortable communicating with her beloved pet dove as she is with the archangel Gabriel, living an unassuming yet spiritually rich life, filled with people of this world and the next. Houghton narrates her experiences of seances and trance mediumship with close friends, discusses her own automatic spirit drawings, and offers an autobiographical glimpse into her day-to-day business. This critical edition, edited by Sara Williams, includes: * Introduction * Author biography * Select bibliography * Explanatory footnotes * Appendices on 'Houghton in the Spiritualist press', 'Automatic spirit drawings' and 'Houghton's spirit photography'

Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443863718
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging by : Teresa Botelho

Download or read book Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging written by Teresa Botelho and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging consists of sixteen essays, reflecting the current conflicted debate on the ontology, constructiveness and affect of categories of ascribed social identity such as gender, ethnicity, race and nation, in the context of British, Irish and North American cultural landscapes. They address the many ways in which these communities of belonging are imagined, iterated, performed, questioned, and deconstructed in literature, cinema and visual culture; they also support or counter claims about the enhanced value of social identity in the expression of the self in the light of the present debates that surround the contested post-identity turn in cultural studies. Significantly, they also address the role of social identity in the field of utopian and dystopian thought, focusing on the projection of imagined futures where alternative means of conceiving ascribed identity are conceptualized. The contributions are shaped by a plurality of approaches and theoretical discourses, and come from both established and emerging scholars and researchers from Europe and beyond. The collection is structured in three sections – the politics of (un)belonging, deconstructing utopian and cultural paradigms, and performing identities in the visual arts – which organize the multidisciplinary discussions around specific nuclei of interrogations.

Sister Sleuths

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Publisher : Pen and Sword History
ISBN 13 : 1526780267
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis Sister Sleuths by : Nell Darby

Download or read book Sister Sleuths written by Nell Darby and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2021-03-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A unique and inherently fascinating history that brings a particular aspect of the role of women in law enforcement up out of obscurity.” —Midwest Book Review The 1857 Divorce Act paved the way for a new career for women: that of the private detective. To divorce, you needed proof of adultery—and men soon realized that women were adept at infiltrating households and befriending wives, learning secrets and finding evidence. Over the course of the next century, women became increasingly confident in gaining work as private detectives, moving from largely unrecognized helpers to the police and to male detectives, to becoming owners of their own detective agencies. In fiction, they were depicted as exciting creatures needing money and work; in fact, they were of varying ages, backgrounds and marital status, seeking adventure and independence as much as money. Former actresses found that detective work utilized their skills at adopting different roles and disguises; former spiritualists were drafted to denounce frauds and stayed to become successful private eyes; and several female detectives became keen supporters of the women’s suffrage movement, having seen for themselves how career-minded women faced obstacles in British society. Sister Sleuths seeks to shed light on the groundbreaking women who have worked over the past century and a half to uncover wrongdoing and solve crimes. “The book is well-researched and provides numerous examples of women who either dabbled in investigation or made it their life’s work.” —Historical Novel Society “Absolutely enthralling stuff.” —Books Monthly

Vibratory Modernism

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137027258
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (37 download)

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Book Synopsis Vibratory Modernism by : A. Enns

Download or read book Vibratory Modernism written by A. Enns and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vibratory Modernism is a collection of original essays that show how vibrations provide a means of bridging science and art - two fields that became increasingly separate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137519703
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century by : Elsa Richardson

Download or read book Second Sight in the Nineteenth Century written by Elsa Richardson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-02 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.