Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317982525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Increasingly, contemporary scholarship reveals the strong connection between Victorian women and the world of the nineteenth-century supernatural. Women were intrinsically bound to the occult and the esoteric from mediums who materialised spirits to the epiphanic experiences of the New Woman, from theosophy to telepathy. This volume addresses the various ways in which Victorian women expressed themselves and were constructed by the occult through a broad range of texts. By examining the roles of women as automatic writing mediums, spiritualists, authors, editors, theosophists, socialists and how they interpreted the occult in their life and work, the contributors in this edition return to sensation novels, ghost stories, autobiographies, séances and fashionable magazines to access the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian life. The variety of texts analysed by the authors in this collection demonstrates the many interpretations of the occult in nineteenth-century culture and the ways that women used supernatural imagery and language to draw attention to issues that bore immediate implications on their own lives. Either by catering for the fad of ghost stories or by giving public trance speeches women harnessed the metaphorical and financial forces of the supernatural. As the articles in this book demonstrate the occult was after all a female affair. This book was published as a special issue of Women's Writing.
Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Author: D. Basham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230374018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
The Trial of Woman examines the impact of the nineteenth-century 'Occult Revival' on the Victorian Women's Movement, both in the lives of individual women and in the literature surrounding 'the Woman Question'. The book explores the Victorian Myth of Occult Womanhood and argues that the notion of female occult power was deeply influenced by the advent of Mesmerism, Spiritualism and Theosophy. This myth was itself a determining factor in women's struggle for legal and political rights.
Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317982517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Increasingly, contemporary scholarship reveals the strong connection between Victorian women and the world of the nineteenth-century supernatural. Women were intrinsically bound to the occult and the esoteric from mediums who materialised spirits to the epiphanic experiences of the New Woman, from theosophy to telepathy. This volume addresses the various ways in which Victorian women expressed themselves and were constructed by the occult through a broad range of texts. By examining the roles of women as automatic writing mediums, spiritualists, authors, editors, theosophists, socialists and how they interpreted the occult in their life and work, the contributors in this edition return to sensation novels, ghost stories, autobiographies, séances and fashionable magazines to access the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian life. The variety of texts analysed by the authors in this collection demonstrates the many interpretations of the occult in nineteenth-century culture and the ways that women used supernatural imagery and language to draw attention to issues that bore immediate implications on their own lives. Either by catering for the fad of ghost stories or by giving public trance speeches women harnessed the metaphorical and financial forces of the supernatural. As the articles in this book demonstrate the occult was after all a female affair. This book was published as a special issue of Women's Writing.
Author: Diana Basham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781349388813
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Diana Basham
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814711743
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Anyone interested in Women's history, literary studies, or the occult will find this book engaging and valuable.
Author: T. Kontou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230240798
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Using a wide range of unexplored archival material, this book examines the 'spectral' influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on women's writing, analyzing the ways in which modern writers have both subverted and mimicked nineteenth century sources in their evocation of the séance.
Author: Alex Owen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226642054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations. The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society. Using previously unexamined sources and an innovative approach, Alex Owen invokes the Victorian world of darkened séance rooms, theatrical apparitions, and moving episodes of happiness lost and regained. She charts the struggles between spiritualists and the medical and legal establishments over the issue of female mediumship, and provides new insights into the gendered dynamics of Victorian society.
Author: Pam Grossman
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 1982145854
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
From the podcast host of The Witch Wave and practicing witch Pam Grossman—who Vulture has dubbed the “Terry Gross of witches”—comes an exploration of the world’s fascination with witches, why they have intrigued us for centuries and why they’re more relevant now than ever. When you think of a witch, what do you picture? Pointy black hat, maybe a broomstick. But witches in various guises have been with us for millennia. In Waking the Witch, Pam Grossman explores the impact of the world’s most magical icon. From the idea of the femme fatale in league with the devil to the bewitching pop culture archetypes in Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Harry Potter; from the spooky ladies in fairy tales to the rise of contemporary witchcraft, witches reflect the power and potential of women. Part cultural analysis, part memoir, Waking the Witch traces the author’s own journey on the path to witchcraft, and how this has helped her find self-empowerment and purpose. It celebrates witches past, present, and future, and reveals the critical role they have played—and will continue to play—in the world as we know it. “Deftly illuminating the past while beckoning us towards the future, Waking the Witch has all the makings of a feminist classic. Wise, relatable, and real, Pam Grossman is the witch we need for our times” (Ami McKay, author of The Witches of New York).
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This article examines the powerful position that female spiritualist practitioners acquired in the spiritualist movement, and its association with the Women's Rights Movement. Woman-centred spiritualism allowed women ample space to examine and subvert Victorian gender norms. In particular, the s©♭ance or dark circle transgressed conventional behaviour and facilitated gender and social change. The female medium, and her trance, the state that allowed her to speak with the dead, were under male scrutiny by medical professionals, who equated them with illness and deviance, thus interpreting both the female body and the state as having a pathological source. In the 1980s cultural historians' work was instrumental in unearthing the forgotten story of female spiritualists. Even though other recent approaches to Victorian spiritualism have provided a more nuanced perspective on spiritualism as being diverse and heterogeneous, it cannot be denied that '[t]he occult was, after all, a female affair' (Kontou 2008: 280).
