Christine Ferguson – författare

Open Secrets examines the popular genre fiction produced by leading figures within Britain's occult revival from the 1840s to the 1930s, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Emma Hardinge Britten, Marie Corelli, Mabel Collins, Arthur Machen, Charles Fort, Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune. Ferguson demonstrates how the revival's popular fictional output was always more than just a reflection of, or mode of propaganda for, unorthodox authorial belief or initiatory intention-this fascinating corpus became a charged site for genre innovation and formal experimentation. The rich spiritual and literary affordances of revival fiction, Open Secrets reveals, were deeply interlinked and mutually transformative. As embraced by occult revivalists, popular literary genres such as the Bildungsroman, the romance, the new journalistic article, and the detective tale forged narrative routes into the unseen world, ones that alternately championed, tested, and challenged the esoteric philosophies and paranormal theories that inspired them.

Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult schema and supernatural phenomena such as astral travel, ritual magic, and reincarnationism. Reflecting the signal array of responses by authors, artists, actors, impresarios and popular entertainers to questions of esoteric spirituality and belief, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the enormous interest in the occult during a time typically associated with the rise of secularization and scientific innovation. The contributors describe how the occult realm functions as a turbulent conceptual and affective space, shifting between poles of faith and doubt, the sacrosanct and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the forensic and the fetishistic. Here, occultism emerges as a practice and epistemology that decisively shapes the literary enterprises of writers such as Dion Fortune and Arthur Machen, artists such as Pamela Colman Smith, and revivalists such as Rolf Gardiner

SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICE!(Valid until three months after publication.)Since its advent in the 1840s, modern spiritualism has been a topic of popular interest and critical scrutiny. Spiritualism gained increasing prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century, and developed as a religious movement with no defining creeds or formal doctrines, beyond the belief that the dead survived in spirit form and could communicate with the living. Scholars have noted its philosophical origins in the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg; considered its rise against the backdrop of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the accompanying crisis in faith; examined the fascination of celebrated believers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William James, and Arthur Conan Doyle; explored its potential in the context of gender and sexuality; charted its investigation by the Society for Psychical Research; and identified key periods that mark a rise in spiritualist activity. The history of spiritualist belief and practice has been the subject of extensive debate (see, for example, Routledge’s eight-volume collection, The Rise of Victorian Spiritualism (2001) (978-0-415-23640-9), edited by Bob Gilbert). Similarly, considerable research has been devoted to the question of Spiritualism and gender (explored in the Routledge/Edition Synapse two-volume collection, Women, Spiritualism, and Madness (2003) (978-0-415-27633-7), edited by Bridget Bennett, Helen Nicholson, and Roy Porter).Complementing those earlier collections, this new four-volume set demonstrates spiritualism’s hugely significant—but hitherto often neglected—contemporary engagement with questions of race, eugenics, and the body, and with anti-spiritualist critique. Moreover, as spiritualism is commonly identified as a predominantly Victorian—and western—phenomenon, little has been done better to understand spiritualism in its global and temporal contexts. Furthermore, while numerous studies of spiritualism in canonical Victorian literature exist, the movement’s own rich literary output and its relationship with the non-spiritualist gothic remain underexplored. Indeed, despite the explosion of scholarly interest in modern spiritualism across a wide range of disciplines, almost none of the movement’s key philosophical, literary, political, and medical texts are currently in print.The learned editors of this collection have remedied these imbalances and Spiritualism, 1840–1930 offers access to a wide range of materials from an important period in spiritualism’s history, including previously unpublished material relating to Arthur Conan Doyle’s investment in spiritualism and transcriptions of the Henri Louis Rey séances in New Orleans (the only entirely African-American nineteenth-century spiritualist circle whose records have been preserved). The collection focuses on key topics and situates inaccessible primary sources alongside better-known works to posit their importance in the development of spiritualism as a social, cultural, and transatlantic phenomenon.Making readily available materials which are currently very difficult for scholars, researchers, and students across the globe to locate and use, Spiritualism, 1840–1930 is a veritable treasure-trove. The gathered materials are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense of immediacy to texts and permitting citation to the original pagination. Each volume is also supplemented by a substantial introduction, newly written by the editors, which contextualizes the material and steers readers towards significant secondary sources. And with a full index and a detailed appendix providing data on the provenance of the gathered works, the collection is destined to be welcomed as a vital research and reference resource.

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

Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

This book reunites Arthur Conan Doyle’s remarkable 1926 psychic novel The Land of Mist, with the erotically charged, religiously provocative and previously unpublished chapter, ‘The Darker Side’, after over a century of separation. The book includes an introduction, a textual essay, critical apparatus, explanatory notes and thirty-one illustrations by F.E. Hiley from the work’s original serialisation in the Strand. It represents Conan Doyle’s most sustained and earnest fictional exploration of the spiritualist movement to which he dedicated the last years of his life. Here the author repurposes the famous protagonist of his popular Professor Challenger series for spiritualist ends, hoping that the bellicose scientist’s dramatic conversion to afterlife belief would inspire a similar effect among its readers.

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