Download or read book Victorian Literary Mesmerism written by Martin Willis and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Literary Mesmerism offers eleven interdisciplinary essays on the intersections between mesmerism and nineteenth-century literature. Its scope is complex and ambitious: ranging from considerations of the impact of literature on quasi-scientific writings of the early 1800s, to a study of Arthur Conan Doyle's use of ‘magnetic' ideas at the fin de siècle . The collection boldly leaps across generic, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries; essays on George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell sit snugly besides studies of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins. Medicine, the law, spiritualism, physics, and literature are all discussed in light of their respective impact on Australian, British, and American history.
Download or read book Mesmerized written by Alison Winter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-12 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: An Invitation to the Seance1: Discovery of the Island of Mesmeria 2: Animal Magnetism Comes to London 3: Experimental Subjects as Scientific Instruments 4: Carnival, Chapel, and Pantomime 5: The Peripatetic Power of the "New Science" 6: Consultations, Conversaziones, and Institutions 7: The Invention of Anesthesia and the Redefinition of Pain 8: Colonizing Sensations in Victorian India9: Emanations from the Sickroom 10: The Mesmeric Cure of Souls 11: Expertise, Common Sense, and the Territories of Science 12: The Social Body and the Invention of Consensus Conclusion: The Day after the Feast Notes Bibliography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book The Victorian Supernatural written by Nicola Bown and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Credulity written by Emily Ogden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.
Download or read book That devil s trick written by William Hughes and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That devil’s trick is the first study of nineteenth-century hypnotism based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of the subject. Drawing on the reports of mesmerists, hypnotists, quack doctors and serious physicians printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the Victorian fin de siècle, the book provides an insight into how continental mesmerism was first understood in Britain, how a number of distinctively British varieties of mesmerism developed, and how these were continually debated in medical, moral and legal terms. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of mesmerism, That devil’s trick will be an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.
Download or read book Mesmerism Medusa and the Muse written by Anne DeLong and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity explores the connections among the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa as an icon of the gendered gaze. An analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and the prose of Mary Shelley reveals that these Romantic-era writers equate the enraptured state that produces spontaneous literary creation with the mesmeric trance. These writers employ Medusan imagery to portray both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject, a conflation of subject/object positions that complicates issues of agency, subjectivity, and gender. Images of Medusan mesmerism ultimately work to deconstruct Romantic ideological dichotomies of self/other, female/male, muse/artist, and sublime/beautiful. In contrast to a traditional, masculinized Romantic discourse that emphasizes self-possession, this study uncovers a feminized, improvisational, Romantic discourse, characterized “Other-possession,” an assumption of the mesmerized subject position that enhances subjective fluidity. This study interrogates the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity through an examination of Romantic poetry, prose, and theory that utilizes mesmeric and Medusan metaphors to suggest creative inspiration.Building on recent scholarship about improvisational poetics, the subversive potential of mesmerism, and Medusa as a feminist icon, this work suggests that the mesmeric Medusan muse not only enables creativity for women writers but also provides a mirror in which they view (and through which they give voice to) their own societal oppression. The mesmeric Medusan muse in Romantic-era literature—from the Ancient Mariner and the Frankenstein monster to the tragic, abandoned Sapphic poetess—often represents the face of oppression, an unwelcome and monstrous truth in nineteenth-century British society. For women writers in particular, braving the stare of the Medusan muse enhances empathy, and therefore inspiration and literary productivity.
Download or read book Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction 1860 1900 written by Phyllis Weliver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the first half of the nineteenth century, writers like Austen and Brontë confined their critiques to satirical portrayals of women musicians. Later, however, a marked shift occurred with the introduction of musical female characters where were positively to be feared. First published in 2000, this book examines the reasons for this shift in representations of female musicians in Victorian fiction from 1860-1900. Focusing on changing gender roles, musical practices and the framing of both of these scientific discourses, the book explores how fictional notions of female musicians diverged from actual trends in music making. This book will be of interest to those studying nineteenth century literature and music.
Download or read book Mesmerists Monsters and Machines written by Martin Willis and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.
Download or read book Strange Science written by Lara Pauline Karpenko and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at scientific inquiry during the Victorian period and the shifting boundary between mainstream and unorthodox sciences of the time
Download or read book The Late Victorian Gothic written by Hilary Grimes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.
Download or read book Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth Century British Writing written by Adela Pinch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.
Download or read book The Notting Hill Mystery written by Charles Felix and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Source documents compiled by insurance investigator Ralph Henderson are used to build a case against Baron "R___", who is suspected of murdering his wife. The baron's wife died from drinking a bottle of acid, apparently while sleepwalking in her husband's private laboratory. Henderson's suspicions are raised when he learns that the baron recently had purchased five life insurance policies for his wife. As Henderson investigates the case, he discovers not one but three murders. Although the baron's guilt is clear to the reader even from the outset, how he did it remains a mystery. Eventually this is revealed, but how to catch him becomes the final challenge; he seems to have committed the perfect crime.
Download or read book Literary Bric Brac and the Victorians written by Jen Harrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-à-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.
Download or read book The Lifted Veil written by George Eliot and published by Xist Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lifted Veil by George Eliot is a gothic novella in the vein of other Victorian horror stories like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. In The Lifted Veil, the unreliable narrator, Latimer, believes that he is cursed with an otherworldly ability to see into the future and the thoughts of other people. This leads to tragedy as his obsession with his brother's fiancee. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture written by Juliet John and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (on 'Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology', 'Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief', and 'Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures', the volume is sub-divided into 9 sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students and established scholars.
Download or read book The Victorian Literature Handbook written by Alexandra Warwick and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-05-22 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian Literature Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the Victorian period. It is a one-stop resource for literature students, providing the essential information and guidance needed from introducing the historical and cultural context to key authors, texts and genres. It includes case studies for reading literary and critical texts, a guide to key critical concepts, introductions to key critical approaches, and a timeline of literary and cultural events. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary research and current and future directions in the field lead into more advanced topics and guided further reading enables further independent work. Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of nineteenth century literature.
Download or read book Reading Victorian Illustration 1855 1875 written by Paul Goldman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a reevaluation of that period in Victorian illustration known as 'The Sixties,' a distinguished group of international scholars consider the impact of illustration on the act of reading; its capacity to reflect, construct, critique and challenge its audience's values; its response to older graphic traditions; and its assimilation of foreign influences. While focused on the years 1855 to 1875, the essays take up issues related to the earlier part of the nineteenth century and look forward to subsequent developments in illustration. The contributors examine significant figures such as Ford Madox Brown, Frederick Sandys, John Everett Millais, George John Pinwell, and Hablot Knight Browne in connection with the illustrated magazine, the mid-Victorian gift book, and changing visual responses to the novels of Dickens. Engaging with a number of theories and critical debates, the collection offers a detailed and provocative analysis of the nature of illustration: its production, consumption, and place within the broader contexts of mid-Victorian culture.
