The Experts below are selected from a list of 4803 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Marlene Tromp - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism
2006Co-Authors: Marlene TrompAbstract:"The psychic cloud" (to use Arthur Conan Doyle's expression) that rained revelations upon the enraptured sitters in Victorian Spiritualist seances, refuses to be dispelled by the light of skepticism. Spiritualism, sometimes dismissed as a silly fad, has recently been attracting serious scholarly attention. If two decades ago, the excellent studies of the history and cultural significance of Spiritualism by Janet Oppenheim and Alex Owen were exceptions, the simultaneous appearance of books by Marlene Tromp and Sarah A. Willburn signifies a renewed attempt to discover the answer to an intriguing question: why did so many Victorian men and women spent their time listening to ghostly communications and gazing at "materialized" spirits produced by mostly young, nubile, and enterprising mediums? As Tromp cogently argues, Spiritualism was an important strand in the web of Victorian culture and society. She points out that the mediums and their audiences engaged in a complex refashioning of the key concepts of the Victorian zeitgeist: gender, race, and individual identity. Tromp argues that Spiritualist praxis undermined rigid gender roles and created a space of freedom in which women (and men) could negotiate the thorny issues of sexuality and marriage and eventually reconfigure the Victorian codes of behavior, so that "the more innovative aspects of Spiritualism may have found their way into the mainstream" (72). In support of this thesis, she examines the lives of individual materialization mediums and diverse fictional texts, from
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spirited sexuality sex marriage and victorian Spiritualism
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2003Co-Authors: Marlene TrompAbstract:S PIRITUALISM WAS SEXY . The Victorian faith of sittings, mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its practitioners and detractors alike and broke all rules of decency and decorum in spite of the fact that it was nurtured and developed in the drawing rooms of the proprietous middle classes. A faith little known to modern scholars and, perhaps for that reason, one which has not often been recognized for its historical and social importance, Spiritualism became the religion of thousands over the course of the last four decades of the period. In spite of its humble and strange beginnings in 1848–a code of raps developed between a murdered peddler and two young American girls–aristocrats, scholars, and scientists, along with ordinary men and women of all ages, were converted to the belief that death was no barrier to communication. This contact, achieved through the services of mediums, who were sensitive to the sounds and sights of the spirit world, provided many with comfort, peace, and the reassurance of an afterlife in a social and intellectual climate that called those things into doubt.
Joseph Crawford - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Seeing Things: Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Romantic Poetry, 1836–1855
Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry, 2019Co-Authors: Joseph CrawfordAbstract:This chapter investigates the rise of mesmerism and Spiritualism in Britain, and the attractions that both movements held for authors and admirers of Romantic poetry. The relationship between mesmeric trance states and poetic creativity will be discussed in relation to the writings of J.C. Colquhoun, Elizabeth Barrett, Harriet Martineau, and Chauncey Hare Townshend, all of whom associated the powers of mesmerism with those of the imagination. It compares their pro-mesmeric writings to those of Browning, arguing that his hostility towards both mesmerism and Spiritualism was connected to his scepticism regarding visionary poetry, and explores the roles played by mesmerism and poetic inspiration in Barrett’s and Browning’s courtship correspondence. The differing ways in which Barrett and Browning responded to mesmerism and Spiritualism serve to illustrate the ways in which beliefs about these subjects were deeply entangled with contemporary controversies over the nature of poetic genius.
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seeing things mesmerism Spiritualism and romantic poetry 1836 1855
2019Co-Authors: Joseph CrawfordAbstract:This chapter investigates the rise of mesmerism and Spiritualism in Britain, and the attractions that both movements held for authors and admirers of Romantic poetry. The relationship between mesmeric trance states and poetic creativity will be discussed in relation to the writings of J.C. Colquhoun, Elizabeth Barrett, Harriet Martineau, and Chauncey Hare Townshend, all of whom associated the powers of mesmerism with those of the imagination. It compares their pro-mesmeric writings to those of Browning, arguing that his hostility towards both mesmerism and Spiritualism was connected to his scepticism regarding visionary poetry, and explores the roles played by mesmerism and poetic inspiration in Barrett’s and Browning’s courtship correspondence. The differing ways in which Barrett and Browning responded to mesmerism and Spiritualism serve to illustrate the ways in which beliefs about these subjects were deeply entangled with contemporary controversies over the nature of poetic genius.
Shannon Delorme - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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physiology or psychic powers william carpenter and the debate over Spiritualism in victorian britain
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2014Co-Authors: Shannon DelormeAbstract:Abstract This paper analyses the attitude of the British Physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–1885) to spiritualist claims and other alleged psychical phenomena in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. It argues that existing portraits of Carpenter as a critic of psychical studies need to be refined so as to include his curiosity about certain ‘unexplained phenomena’, as well as broadened so as to take into account his overarching epistemological approach in a context of theological and social fluidity within nineteenth-century British Unitarianism. Carpenter's hostility towards Spiritualism has been well documented, but his interest in the possibility of thought-transference or his secret fascination with the medium Henry Slade have not been mentioned until now. This paper therefore highlights Carpenter's ambivalences and focuses on his conciliatory attitude towards a number of heterodoxies while suggesting that his Unitarian faith offers the keys to understanding his unflinching rationalism, his belief in the enduring power of mind, and his effort to resolve dualisms.
Susan Rowland - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Women, Spiritualism and Depth Psychology in Michèle Roberts’s Victorian Novel
Rereading Victorian Fiction, 2000Co-Authors: Susan RowlandAbstract:In the Red Kitchen by Michele Roberts is a contemporary feminist novel partly set in the Victorian London of female Spiritualist mediums.1 Its two other temporal sites are Ancient Egypt and London in the grim 1980s where ‘Victorian values’ have restored homelessness and poverty. The novel hinges upon imagining together two related nineteenth-century issues: Spiritualism with its preponderance of female mediums, and its implications in the succeeding discourse of depth psychology. By depth psychology I refer to the theories of Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung who were both concerned to theorize upon the unruly bodies of women a medical discourse of hysteria, defining as ‘the unconscious’ what had earlier been attributed to the occult. Only the Victorian portion of In the Red Kitchen is assigned historical sources in the ‘Author’s Note’, which cites Alex Owen’s essay in Language, Gender and Childhood and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady.2 Specifically feminist histories, these sources mark a new development in the historical novel as the products of feminist academic research of the 1970s and 1980s becomes absorbed into fictional writing. In its examination of the genesis of depth psychology with its gender politics, erotic drives and occluded relationship to Spiritualism, In the Red Kitchen is a continuation of feminist research challenging, but not pretending to replace, traditional history.
Susa Rowland - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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women Spiritualism and depth psychology in michele roberts s victorian novel
2000Co-Authors: Susa RowlandAbstract:In the Red Kitchen by Michele Roberts is a contemporary feminist novel partly set in the Victorian London of female Spiritualist mediums.1 Its two other temporal sites are Ancient Egypt and London in the grim 1980s where ‘Victorian values’ have restored homelessness and poverty. The novel hinges upon imagining together two related nineteenth-century issues: Spiritualism with its preponderance of female mediums, and its implications in the succeeding discourse of depth psychology. By depth psychology I refer to the theories of Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung who were both concerned to theorize upon the unruly bodies of women a medical discourse of hysteria, defining as ‘the unconscious’ what had earlier been attributed to the occult. Only the Victorian portion of In the Red Kitchen is assigned historical sources in the ‘Author’s Note’, which cites Alex Owen’s essay in Language, Gender and Childhood and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady.2 Specifically feminist histories, these sources mark a new development in the historical novel as the products of feminist academic research of the 1970s and 1980s becomes absorbed into fictional writing. In its examination of the genesis of depth psychology with its gender politics, erotic drives and occluded relationship to Spiritualism, In the Red Kitchen is a continuation of feminist research challenging, but not pretending to replace, traditional history.
