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Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive
examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial
nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the
Victorian fin-de-siecle. Focusing on a variety of literary and
non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the
Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of
language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing
linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson
demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and
anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were
co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality
of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie
Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker
used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the
relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote
much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In
its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of
human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the
Victorian Fin-de-Siecle stands as a corrective to assessments of
best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic
simplicity.
Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive
examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial
nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the
Victorian fin-de-siecle. Focusing on a variety of literary and
non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the
Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of
language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing
linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson
demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and
anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were
co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality
of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie
Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker
used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the
relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote
much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In
its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of
human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the
Victorian Fin-de-Siecle stands as a corrective to assessments of
best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic
simplicity.
Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the
founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious
occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an
unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult schema
and supernatural phenomena such as astral travel, ritual magic, and
reincarnationism. Reflecting the signal array of responses by
authors, artists, actors, impresarios and popular entertainers to
questions of esoteric spirituality and belief, this
interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the enormous interest in
the occult during a time typically associated with the rise of
secularization and scientific innovation. The contributors describe
how the occult realm functions as a turbulent conceptual and
affective space, shifting between poles of faith and doubt, the
sacrosanct and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the
forensic and the fetishistic. Here, occultism emerges as a practice
and epistemology that decisively shapes the literary enterprises of
writers such as Dion Fortune and Arthur Machen, artists such as
Pamela Colman Smith, and revivalists such as Rolf Gardiner
SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICE! (Valid until three months after
publication.) Since its advent in the 1840s, modern spiritualism
has been a topic of popular interest and critical scrutiny.
Spiritualism gained increasing prominence in the second half of the
nineteenth century, and developed as a religious movement with no
defining creeds or formal doctrines, beyond the belief that the
dead survived in spirit form and could communicate with the living.
Scholars have noted its philosophical origins in the writings of
Emmanuel Swedenborg; considered its rise against the backdrop of
Darwin's theory of evolution and the accompanying crisis in faith;
examined the fascination of celebrated believers such as Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, William James, and Arthur Conan Doyle; explored
its potential in the context of gender and sexuality; charted its
investigation by the Society for Psychical Research; and identified
key periods that mark a rise in spiritualist activity. The history
of spiritualist belief and practice has been the subject of
extensive debate (see, for example, Routledge's eight-volume
collection, The Rise of Victorian Spiritualism (2001)
(978-0-415-23640-9), edited by Bob Gilbert). Similarly,
considerable research has been devoted to the question of
Spiritualism and gender (explored in the Routledge/Edition Synapse
two-volume collection, Women, Spiritualism, and Madness (2003)
(978-0-415-27633-7), edited by Bridget Bennett, Helen Nicholson,
and Roy Porter). Complementing those earlier collections, this new
four-volume set demonstrates spiritualism's hugely significant-but
hitherto often neglected-contemporary engagement with questions of
race, eugenics, and the body, and with anti-spiritualist critique.
Moreover, as spiritualism is commonly identified as a predominantly
Victorian-and western-phenomenon, little has been done better to
understand spiritualism in its global and temporal contexts.
Furthermore, while numerous studies of spiritualism in canonical
Victorian literature exist, the movement's own rich literary output
and its relationship with the non-spiritualist gothic remain
underexplored. Indeed, despite the explosion of scholarly interest
in modern spiritualism across a wide range of disciplines, almost
none of the movement's key philosophical, literary, political, and
medical texts are currently in print. The learned editors of this
collection have remedied these imbalances and Spiritualism,
1840-1930 offers access to a wide range of materials from an
important period in spiritualism's history, including previously
unpublished material relating to Arthur Conan Doyle's investment in
spiritualism and transcriptions of the Henri Louis Rey seances in
New Orleans (the only entirely African-American nineteenth-century
spiritualist circle whose records have been preserved). The
collection focuses on key topics and situates inaccessible primary
sources alongside better-known works to posit their importance in
the development of spiritualism as a social, cultural, and
transatlantic phenomenon. Making readily available materials which
are currently very difficult for scholars, researchers, and
students across the globe to locate and use, Spiritualism,
1840-1930 is a veritable treasure-trove. The gathered materials are
reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy
to texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. Each
volume is also supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly
written by the editors, which contextualizes the material and
steers readers towards significant secondary sources. And with a
full index and a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance
of the gathered works, the collection is destined to be welcomed as
a vital research and reference resource.
Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the
founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious
occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an
unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult schema
and supernatural phenomena such as astral travel, ritual magic, and
reincarnationism. Reflecting the signal array of responses by
authors, artists, actors, impresarios and popular entertainers to
questions of esoteric spirituality and belief, this
interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the enormous interest in
the occult during a time typically associated with the rise of
secularization and scientific innovation. The contributors describe
how the occult realm functions as a turbulent conceptual and
affective space, shifting between poles of faith and doubt, the
sacrosanct and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the
forensic and the fetishistic. Here, occultism emerges as a practice
and epistemology that decisively shapes the literary enterprises of
writers such as Dion Fortune and Arthur Machen, artists such as
Pamela Colman Smith, and revivalists such as Rolf Gardiner
Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented
explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in
literacy across social classes. New printing technologies
facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated
books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass
readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day
impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both
driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time. From this
starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the
relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s
steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and
reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing
worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts
from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored. In this
collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and
art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward
Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their
antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in
Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on
neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but
converses with the present. Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate
Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian
Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika
Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley
Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic
and hard hereditarian thought. Studying transatlantic spiritualist
literature from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, Christine
Ferguson focuses on its incorporation and dissemination of
bio-determinist and eugenic thought. She asks why ideas about
rational reproduction, hereditary determinism and race improvement
became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists and
biographers in this period. She also examines how these concerns
drove emerging Spiritualist understandings of disability,
intelligence, crime, conception, the afterlife and aesthetic
production. The book draws on rare material, including articles and
serialized fiction from Spiritualist periodicals such as Light, The
Two Worlds and The Medium and Daybreak as well as on Spiritualist
healing, parentage and sex manuals. Key Features: *The first major
study of Transatlantic Spiritualism's sustained commitment to
eugenics, bio-determinism and hard hereditarianism *Devotes a
chapter to eugenic and raciological writing of Paschal Beverly
Randolph, the nineteenth-century African-American Rosicrucian and
sex magician whose work has only recently been rediscovered by
scholars * Interdisciplinary and historicist methodology * The rich
transatlantic reading demonstrates the continuity and influence
between British and American Spiritualist writings on the body,
reproduction and mental fitness
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