The Victorian Supernatural

by Edited by Nicola Bown , Carolyn Burdett , Pamela Thurschwell

• ISBN13: 9780521114646
• ISBN10: 0521114640
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Notes on contributors

Foreward Gillian Beer

Supernatural Science

Spiritualism, science and the supernatural in mid-Victorian Britain

Investigations and fictions: Charles Dickens and ghosts

Invisible Women

Spectral politics: the Victorian ghost story and the domestic servant

George Eliot's prophecies: coercive second sight and everyday thought reading

Raising the Dead

Browning, the dramatic monologue and the resuscitation of the dead

Baron Corvo and the key to the underworld

Envisioning the Unseen

What is the stuff that dreams are made of?

Holman Hunt, William Dyce and the image of Christ

Imperial Occult

Knowledge, belief and the supernatural at the imperial margin

Romance, reincarnation and Rider Haggard

Haunted modernism

The origins of modernism in the haunted properties of literature

Afterword Steven Connor

Bibliography

Index

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