This text examines the relationship between the Anglican Church and Spiritualism following World War I. A study of the "claims of Spiritualism in relation to the Christian faith" carried out after World War I, but only made public in 1979, was found to be favourable to Spiritualism. The book explores the rise in the popularity of Spiritualism after the war as Anglican's failed to find solace in the teachings of their own faith; and it explores the connection of religious faith and bereavement between the two World Wars.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Spiritualism after the Great War-- Catholic connections-- virgin mothers and warrior maids-- possession, dissociation and unseen families-- mothers. mediums and vampires-- frustration, repression and deviant desire-- the dual agenda of psychical research-- becoming a medium.
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Historians of modern British culture have long assumed that under pressure from secular forces, interest in spiritualism had faded by the end of the Great War. Jenny Hazelgrove challenges this assumption and shows how spiritualism grew between the wars and became part of the fabric of popular culture. This work provides an insight into an alternative culture that flourished - alongside more conventional outlets for spiritual beliefs and needs. Hazelgrove uses a vast range of primary material from this period, such as films, novels and autobiographies, as well as mass observation surveys to present her case. Hazelgrove suggests that the movement continued to gain in popularity after World War I, and explores the raging contemporary debate over its meaning. By doing this, she engages with issues of gender, subjectivity and power in relation to the development of the image of the medium and of spiritualism in general.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgements-- List of Figures-- Series Editor's Preface-- Introduction-- Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium-- Spirits in Mind: Madness, Idiocy, and the Cultural Capital of Ignorance-- Eugenic Summer Lands: Sexual Reproduction and Family Engineering in the Spheres-- Blended Souls: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Occult Miscegenation-- Criminal Man and Recidivist Spirit: Spiritualism, Criminal Anthropology, and Thanato-Rehabilitationism-- Dead Letters: Bio-Aesthetics and the New Realism in Fin-de-Siecle Spiritualism-- Conclusion-- Bibliography-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Theatres in the Skull: The Society for Psychical Research and Actress Narratives Well-tuned Mediums: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson Phantasms of Florence Cook in Michele Roberts' In the Red Kitchen Natural and Spiritual Evolutions: A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects The Other World Illuminated: Wiring Science, Text and Spirit in Victoria Glendinning's Electricity Queering the Seance: Sarah Waters' Affinity Conclusion Bibliography Notes Index.
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This original and imaginative study examines the influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on a variety of modern and contemporary female authors. It explores both the material and ghostly connections between women's writing - particularly the work of Michele Roberts, A.S. Byatt, Victoria Glendinning and Sarah Waters - and the practice of mediumship in the nineteenth century. For the first time, it provides a sustained analysis of how and why the haunted world of Victorian spiritualism has been appropriated and reimagined in late twentieth-century fiction. In addition, it shows how many of the apparently unprecedented innovations of modernism are in fact already present in the rituals, performances and documents of the Victorian seance. Supported by compelling archival research throughout, the book not only demonstrates how a unique selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts are bound together by phantasmal ties but also shows how spiritualism forces us to reconsider our wider understanding of history, narrative and the afterlife.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Orthodox Christianity, scientific materialism, and alternative religions
• The evolution of occult spirituality in Victorian England and the representative case of Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• Anthony Trollope's religion : the orthodox/heterodox boundary
• The influences of Buddhism and comparative religion on Matthew Arnold's theology
• Interpenetration of religion and national politics in Great Britain and Sri Lanka : William Knighton's Forest life in Ceylon
• Identity, genre, and religion in Anna Leonowens' The English governess at the Siamese court
• Ancient Egyptian religion in late-Victorian England
• The economics of immortality : the demi-immortal Oriental, Enlightenment vitalism, and political economy in Bram Stoker's Dracula
• Conclusion : from Victorian occultism to new age spiritualities.

Spirit Matters explores the heterodox and unorthodox religions and spiritualities that arose in Victorian Britain as a result of the faltering of Christian faith in the face of modernity, the rise of the truth-telling authority of science, and the...
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
Spirit Matters explores the heterodox and unorthodox religions and spiritualities that arose in Victorian Britain as a result of the faltering of Christian faith in the face of modernity, the rise of the truth-telling authority of science, and the first full exposure of the West to non-Christian religions. J. Jeffrey Franklin investigates the diversity of ways that spiritual seekers struggled to maintain faith or to create new faiths by reconciling elements of the Judeo-Christian heritage with Spiritualism, Buddhism, occultism, and scientific naturalism. Spirit Matters covers a range of scenarios from the Victorian hearth and the state-Church altar to the frontiers of empire in Buddhist countries and Egyptian crypts. Franklin reveals how this diversity of elements provided the materials for the formation of new hybrid religions and the emergence in the 20th century of New Age spiritualities. Franklin investigates a broad spectrum of experiences through a series of representative case studies that together trace the development of unorthodox religious and spiritual discourses. The ideas and events discussed by Franklin through these case studies were considered outside the domain of orthodox religion yet still religious or spiritual rather than atheistic or materialistic. Among the works-obscure and canonical-he analyzes are Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni and A Strange Story; Forest Life in Ceylon, by William Knighton; Anthony Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton; Anna Leonowens's The English Governess at the Siamese Court; Literature and Dogma, by Matthew Arnold ; and Bram Stoker's Dracula.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The medium on the stage : theatricality and performance in the spirit séance
• Parlor games : play and social life in the haunted house
• Breaking the news : controversy, sensation, and the popular press
• Mediums and stars : religion, consumerism, and celebrity culture
• Stranger than fiction : print media, automatic writing, and popular culture
• The marvels of superimposition : spirit photography and spiritualism's visual culture.

"Explores the proliferation of spiritualist séances in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, and the connection to the contemporary evolution of the media entertainment industry"--Provided by publisher.

• Victorian theatre and theatricality in Victorian culture
• The Victorian woman as actress and the roles she played
• Mesmer and Charcot : the trance performance as medical show
• The performances of Elizabeth O'Key : the medical theatre of mesmerism
• "Double consciousness" in acting theory and trance state
• "Call me Gypsy" : Anna Cora Mowatt's trance performances
• The rise of spiritualism and the Fox sisters
• Séance as theatre
• Spirit travels to distant times and places
• Cora L.V. Richmond : spiritualist trance star
• The performance of "Ouina" and the racial "other"
• Spiritualism crosses over to England : Florence Cook and the materialization séance
• "Katie King" and Robert Dale Owen
• Materialization, ectoplasm, and realism.

Spiritualists in the nineteenth century spoke of a place they called the 'Borderland', a shadowy threshold where the living communed with the dead, and where those in the material realm could receive comfort or advice from another world. Drawing upon the skilled performances of mostly female actors and performers, the 'borderland' became a theatre, of sorts, in which dramas of revelation and recognition were produced in the forms of seances, trances, and spiritualist lectures. This book examines some of the most fascinating American and British actresses of the Victorian era, whose 'borderland' performances fairly mesmerized their audiences of amused skeptics and ardent believers. The book also focuses on the transformative possibilities of the spiritualist theatre, revealing how the performances allowed Victorian women to speak, act, and create outside the boundaries of their restricted social and psychological roles.
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• Necrobibliography
• The undeath of the author
• Necrobardolatry
• Metaphorical mediumship
• Modernist hauntology
• Ghostwriting postmodernism
• Epilogue ghostreading.

Spiritualism is often dismissed by literary critics and historians as merely a Victorian fad. Helen Sword demonstrates that it continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and seeks to explain why. Literary modernism, she maintains, is replete with ghosts and spirits. In Ghostwriting Modernism she explores spiritualism's striking persistence and what she calls "the vexed relationship between mediumistic discourse and modernist literary aesthetics."Sword begins with a brief historical review of popular spiritualism's roots in nineteenth-century literary culture. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the forms of mediumship most closely allied with writing, the forms of writing most closely allied with mediumship, and the thematic and aesthetic alliances between popular spiritualism and modernist literature. Finally, she accounts for the recent proliferation of a spiritualist-influenced vocabulary (ghostliness, hauntings, the uncanny) in the works of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and especially literary critics and theorists.Documenting the hitherto unexplored relationship between spiritualism and modern authors (some credulous, some skeptical), Sword offers compelling readings of works by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H.D., James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Even as modernists mock spiritualism's ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical excesses, she finds, they are intrigued and attracted by its ontological shiftiness, its blurring of the traditional divide between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving tendency to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message). Like modernism itself, Sword asserts, spiritualism embraces rather than eschews paradox, providing an ideological space where conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic, thought and action.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Those who know Jane Goodall through her many books, speeches, and National Geographic television specials, know she is obviously no ordinary scientist. She is a genuinely spiritual woman who cares passionately about the preservation and enhancement of life in all its forms. Based upon the many spiritual experiences that have graced and shaped her outlook on life, Dr. Goodall is convinced there is a higher purpose to life, and that this purpose can best be served by a sense of reverence for creation - a commitment to opening our hearts and minds to the spiritual ties that bind us to the Earth. In this book, Dr. Goodall takes us through the pivotal events of her life - her childhood in war-torn England, her relationship with the Leakeys, her groundbreaking work with the chimpanzees of Gombe - and in doing so, touches upon such topics as faith and love, mysticism and science, the origins of good and evil and evolution, and the existence of the soul and of God. She sheds light not only on why millions of people today are hungry for meaning, but on the steps we can take to transform our lives for the better; to rekindle our spirits and reawaken our minds.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The medium on the stage : theatricality and performance in the spirit séance
• Parlor games : play and social life in the haunted house
• Breaking the news : controversy, sensation, and the popular press
• Mediums and stars : religion, consumerism, and celebrity culture
• Stranger than fiction : print media, automatic writing, and popular culture
• The marvels of superimposition : spirit photography and spiritualism's visual culture.

"Explores the proliferation of spiritualist séances in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, and the connection to the contemporary evolution of the media entertainment industry"--Provided by publisher.

An introduction to different kinds of material from various Celtic areas, with examples from the earliest times to the present day. Many of the pieces are presented as translations on Celtic Christianity drawing on creative and life-affirming qualities.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. Awareness.
• 2. Commitment.
• 3. Sweetness and Cold.
• 4. Pilgrimage.
• 5. First Creation.
• 6. Focus.
• 7. Alignment.
• 8. Wise Creating.
• 9. Enlightenment. Coda: Future Thoughts. References. Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In this thoughtful and profound account Peter Houghton charts his personal quest for the spirit. His extraordinary story is written during the time in which he had received a diagnosis of terminal heart disease and reflects on the ways in which being about to die developed his ideas about spirituality and humanity. He describes the development of his search for understanding and meaning in life from an initial sense of spiritual awareness through stages of uncertainty and despair to the ultimate formation of a unifying personal philosophy. Writing in an accessible and personalised style he discusses important questions about ethics and meaning in life, the problem of evil, and organised and personal religion, considering the ideas of Christianity and other faiths.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture" explores the wide range of issues centered round the theme of male spirituality in the 19th century drawing on the disciplines history, cultural studies, art history, and literary criticism. The study focuses on a wide range of issues including ideological and iconographical representations across the major Christian denominations, militarianism and hymnody and male sexuality and homoeroticism. At this time controversial, this study looks beyond the "canon" of acknowledged prescribers of gender identity, focusing on non-conformist figures such as William Booth and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and also the work of 19th century homosexual writers such as John Addington Symonds. The study also explores relational aspects of gender, examining the work of women writers such as Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, and Charlotte Bronte and their writing on men and masculinity, and at male responses to the figure of the Virgin Mary. .
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Making of an Early Modern Miracle Healer: Valentine Greatrakes, 1629-1660
• 3. Greatrakes, Ireland, and the Restoration, 1660-1665
• 4. 'An Exemplar of Candid and Sincere Christianity': Greatrakes' Mission to England in 1666
• 5. Healing, Witchcraft, and the Body Politic in Restoration Britain
• 6. Epilogue and conclusion
• Appendix 1: The family tree of Valentine Greatrakes
• Appendix 2: A biographical index of those either cured by Greatrakes, or who testified, witnessed, or commented upon his cures
• Appendix 3: Letters addressed to Valentine Greatrakes, 1666-1672
• Bibliography
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In 1666 Valentine Greatrakes achieved brief but widespread fame as a miracle healer. Dubbed the 'Stroker', he is widely believed to have touched and cured thousands of men, women, and children suffering from a large range of acute diseases and chronic conditions. His actions attracted the attention of the King, Charles II, as well as other eminent figures at court and in the various institutions of government and learning, including the newly founded Royal Society. However, there was little consensus as to the nature and origin of his gift and, following a brief period of intense lobbying on his behalf, he retired to Ireland and relative obscurity. Most histories of this period rarely grant the strange events surrounding the appearance of Greatrakes much more than an occasional footnote. Here, however, for the first time the compelling story of Greatrakes the man, and his place in the history of seventeenth-century Britain, is told in full for the first time. Based on extensive research in Irish and English archives, it reveals a fascinating account of one man's engagement with, and response to, some of the most important events of the period, including the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the English civil wars, the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland, and the Restoration of 1660. In the process, it shows how Greatrakes' claims to heal the bodies of the sick and maimed were in large part a response to broader divisions within the fractured body politic of Britain - an approach that was enthusiastically received by many prominent figures in church and state who were eager to seek reconciliation and rapprochement in the early years of the Restoration.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)