Victorian Literary Mesmerism

Victorian Literary Mesmerism PDF Author: Martin Willis
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042020083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
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.

Victorian Literary Mesmerism

Victorian Literary Mesmerism PDF Author: Martin Willis
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042020083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Mesmerized

Mesmerized PDF Author: Alison Winter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226902197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
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.

Victorian Literary Mesmerism

Victorian Literary Mesmerism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401203016
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Victorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing. Drawing on recent trends in interdisciplinary literary scholarship the essays collected here investigate the complex connections between scientific mesmerism, its manifestations in the Victorian social and cultural world, and the literary imagination. Here, for the first time, the varied themes and contexts shaped by mesmeric practices are brought together in one volume. Mesmerism’s influence on phrenology, medicine and mental health; its interaction with the occult and with communication technologies; the effects of mesmeric principles on gender and sexuality, as well as on criminal behaviour, are all set within the context of literary texts that interrogate and critique mesmerism’s influence on the Victorians. This volume will be of interest, therefore, to scholars of Victorian literature and the history of science, as well as to those interested in cultural history with a focus on gender, sexuality, and sciences of the mind.

Credulity

Credulity PDF Author: Emily Ogden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022653247X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.

The Victorian Supernatural

The Victorian Supernatural PDF Author: Nicola Bown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521810159
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
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Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing PDF Author: Adela Pinch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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.

Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse

Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse PDF Author: Anne DeLong
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739170449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
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. This analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the works of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) contributes to recent scholarship about improvisational poetics, the subversive potential of mesmerism, and Medusa as a feminist icon.

The Lifted Veil

The Lifted Veil PDF Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 1513275402
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 39

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Book Description
Latimer is cursed with psychic abilities that allow him to see the future, yet he’s unable to avoid the dark turn of his own life. What many consider a gift, he sees as a curse that has destroyed his ability to have normal relationships. Latimer can hear people’s deepest thoughts and has visions of their impending future. It’s a power he acquired at a young age following a brief illness. Latimer loathes his ability, as it has made it nearly impossible for him to make genuine connections. He unknowingly uncovers dark secrets that reveal the worst of humanity. Despite this foresight, Latimer’s desire to control his own narrative blinds him to an inevitable outcome. The Lifted Veil is a unique entry in Eliot’s literary catalogue. It was released the same year as her debut novel, Adam Bede, and is a stark departure from her usual themes. It highlights a different point-of-view and Eliot’s diverse storytelling ability. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Lifted Veil is both modern and readable.

That devil's trick

That devil's trick PDF Author: William Hughes
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152610198X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
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.

Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900

Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900 PDF Author: Phyllis Weliver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317195256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
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.