The Invention of Telepathy

by Luckhurst, Roger

• ISBN13: 9780199249626
• ISBN10: 0199249628
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Invention of Telepathy explores one of the enduring concepts to emerge from the late nineteenth century. Telepathy was coined by Frederic Myers in 1882. He defined it as 'the communication of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense'. By 1901 ithad become a disputed phenomenon amongst physical scientists yet was the 'royal road' to the unconscious mind. Telepathy was discussed by eminent men and women of the day, including Sigmund Freud, Thomas Huxley, Henry and William James, Mary Kingsley, Andrew Lang, Vernon Lee, W. T. Stead, and OscarWilde. Did telepathy signal evolutionary advance or possible decline? Could it be a means of binding the Empire closer together, or was it used by natives to subvert imperial communications? Were women more sensitive than men, and if so why? Roger Luckhurst investigates these questions in anexciting and accessible study that mixes history of science with cultural history and literary analysis.

Author Biography

Roger Luckhurst is Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London, and co-editor of Roger of The Fin-de-Siecle (OUP, 2000).

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
Part I
Terrains of Emergence, 1870-1882	9	(51)
The Settlement of Scientific Naturalism	12	(5)
Institutions of Science	17	(5)
Fragilities	22	(2)
William Crookes---Chemist, Spectroscopist, and Spiritualist	24	(8)
Dirty Tricks?	32	(5)
The Darwin Seance, 1874	37	(7)
The Lankester Seance and the Trial of Henry Slade, 1876	44	(3)
The Psychological Society of Great Britain, 1875-1879	47	(4)
Sociological Pathways: Founding the Society for Psychical Research	51	(9)
Coining Telepathy: Concept and Elaboration, 1882-1901	60	(57)
Immediate Resources: Mind-Readers and Parlour Games	61	(8)
Black-Boxing Telepathy	69	(6)
Discursive Levers I: The Physics of Inter-phenomena	75	(17)
Discursive Levers II: Vanishing Points in Fin-de-Siecle Psychology	92	(15)
The Myers Synthesis: Telepathy and the Subliminal Consciousness	107	(5)
Out of the Knot, and into the Territory	112	(5)
Part II
Making Connections: W. T. Stead's Occult Economies	117	(31)
High and Low	117	(5)
'In Touch with Life at All Points': Stead's Trajectory	122	(9)
Affective Journalism	131	(4)
The Edge of the Electric Future	135	(5)
The Tie that Binds the World	140	(8)
Telepathic Doxai: Knowledge and Belief at the Imperial Margin	148	(33)
'Where Are the Letters?'	148	(6)
The Phantasmal Empire	154	(6)
Andrew Lang: Psycho-folklorist	160	(7)
Mary Kingsley and the 'Capacity to Think in Black'	167	(6)
Rudyard Kipling's Gossip-Tales	173	(8)
Psychical Research and the Late Victorian Gothic	181	(33)
Generic Reactions: The Resistance to Theory?	186	(4)
Degrees of Ambivalence: Robert Louis Stevenson	190	(6)
Grant Allen	196	(3)
Arthur Machen	199	(5)
Trance-Texts: Distant Influence as Gothic Trope	204	(4)
Remote Control Victorians: The Beetle and Dracula	208	(6)
The Woman Sensitive: Nerves, New Women, and Henry James	214	(38)
'The Finer Characters of Psychic Life'	215	(4)
Valences of the New Woman	219	(8)
Entanglements with Mediums	227	(7)
'I Too Was a ``Sensitive''': William, Henry, and Alice James	234	(3)
After 1890: The Psychical Jameses	237	(4)
Henry James's Romances of Occult Relation	241	(11)
Afterlives, 1901-1934	252	(27)
The Death and Life of Frederic Myers	253	(3)
Modernism, Psychism, and the Occult Revival	256	(8)
Cross-correspondence and Collage	264	(6)
Freud's Little Local Difficulty	270	(9)
Bibliography	279	(40)
Index	319