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Author: Srdjan Smajić
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139485881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we 'see' is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.
Author: Srdjan Smajić
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139485881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we 'see' is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.
Author: Matt Cardin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
This fascinating work provides a complete overview of paranormal phenomena, including the beliefs, attitudes, and notable figures who have attempted to explain, defend, or debunk the mysteries behind the unknown. Recent interest in the paranormal as pop culture fodder belies its historical status as an important subject of cultural, philosophical, and scientific significance. This book traces the trajectory of paranormal studies from its early role as a serious academic and scientific topic studied by mainstream scientists and eminent scholars to its current popularity in books, film, and TV. This compelling reference work details the experiences, encounters, and ideas that make up this controversial field of study. The contributed entries examine the broad phenomena of the paranormal, addressing the history of scientific investigations along with its contemporary media depictions to illustrate the evolution of cultural attitudes about the paranormal. A selection of primary documents provides real-life accounts and contributions from noted experts that explore the full scope of themes from spiritualism to poltergeists to astrology. Accompanying images, timelines, quotations, and sidebars make the content come to life and encourage alternative explanations of these events.
Author: Jill Galvan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with séances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted—in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in séance parlors—by women. In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers a richly nuanced and culturally grounded analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the century. Examining a wide variety of fictional explorations of feminine channeling (in both the technological and supernatural realms) by such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and George Du Maurier, Galvan argues that women were often chosen for that role, or assumed it themselves, because they made at-a-distance dialogues seem more intimate, less mediated. Two allegedly feminine traits, sympathy and a susceptibility to automatism, enabled women to disappear into their roles as message-carriers.Anchoring her literary analysis in discussions of social, economic, and scientific culture, Galvan finds that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of mediated communication reveals the challenges that the new networked culture presented to prevailing ideas of gender, dialogue, privacy, and the relationship between body and self.
Author: Ruth Heholt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000173232
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing is prescient. Best known today for her collection of "real" ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: or of Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works cover the Newgate genre, help to initiate detective fiction, include elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and point the way to the sensation novels of the 1860s. Politically radical in many ways Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights. This volume aims to restore an author who was "[o]nce as famous as Dickens or Thackeray" (Wilson 1986, v) to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature.
Author: Emily Alder
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030326527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.
Author: Annette Kern-Stähler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019284377X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 540
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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means by which literary texts engage with, open up, or make uncertain dominant views of the nature of perception. Considering the ways in which literary texts intersect with and diverge from scientific, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives, these essays explore a wide variety of literary moments of sensation including: the interspecies exchange of a look between a swan and a young Indigenous Australian girl; the sound of bees as captured in an early modern poem; the noxious smell of the 'Great Stink' that recurs in the Victorian novel; the taste of an eggplant registered in a poetic performance; tactile gestures in medieval romance; and the representation of a world in which the interdependence of human beings with the purple hibiscus plant is experienced through all five senses. The collection builds upon and breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies, focusing on what makes literature especially suitable to engaging with, contributing to, and challenging our perennial understandings of, the senses.
Author: Simon Sweetman
Publisher: Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians
ISBN: 1908165219
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876-1922). It turns out that this curious combination of names is a contrivance and so it attracts twentieth-first century doubt. His Edwardian friends shortened it to Hex. But there is little to doubt about his achievements. While still at school he was asked to play cricket for Scotland. Playing in 86 first-class matches as a pastime, mostly for Hampshire, his fast bowling secured 339 wickets at twenty-two, though his batting drew comparisons with shovelling. He played country-house and weekend cricket with artistic and authorial cronies as well as some of the best amateur cricketers of the day. Around his cricket he fitted in a remarkably diverse range of activities. Giving up life in a solicitor’s office, he had a ‘gap year’ in Spain and Portugal when these were distant countries and went on to Morocco where he tried the local narcotic. His experiences set him on a lifetime of travelling. In Argentina he sought a giant sloth; in Haiti he discovered voodoo and found that ‘black ruled white’; in eastern Canada he visited the tundra and its migrating caribou. He wrote up his travels for newspapers, magazines and academic journals and drew on his findings to write, with his mother, pulp fiction – serialised in the days before broadcast media – whose popularity rivalled the mighty Conan Doyle. His concerns ‘triggered’ early conservation legislation. Twice decorated in the Great War, he did much to raise the effectiveness of Allied sniping to German standards. Simon Sweetman traces a life from near penury in infancy, via the Channel Islands, the pre-independence Dublin social ‘season’ and an unlikely marriage into the aristocracy, to its tragic end at 45.
Author: Lisa Rodensky
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199533148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 829
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.
Author: Janice M. Allan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107155851
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Accessible exploration of Sherlock Holmes and his relationship to late-Victorian culture as well as his ongoing significance and popularity.
Author: Daragh Downes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137518235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history. With an afterword by John Sutherland
