Emily Ogden – författare

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.

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.

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.

A beautifully written suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing. Moments of clarity and revelation are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty and irresolution within which we make our lives? Amid the drudgery of daily responsibilities and under a cloud of political foreboding, there's beauty in errancy, in meandering, in tracking perception's bright thread without knowing where it leads. Written by English professor Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her brief, sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of willful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defenselessness of not knowing yet-possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows, beautifully, how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.

Darkness Becomes Bright is an unflinching exploration of horror, the human condition, and how Edgar Allan Poe's haunted legacy might keep us company in moments of darkness.'A wonderfully engaging account of Poe’s troubled life and work . . . Nimble, generous, brimming with insight' - SARAH WATERS'Emily Ogden does not flinch from the obscure and sometimes horrifying recesses of Poe’s psychosis' - SUE PRIDEAUXAre you brave enough to step into the darkness?Edgar Allan Poe did not truly die. In the years since his mysterious demise, his works have captivated millions and spawned the genres of horror and the detective story. His masterpieces — filled with talking ravens and buried women, haunted houses and beating hearts — live on in our imaginations and our nightmares. They are endlessly adapted, parodied and obsessed over.But who was Edgar Allan Poe? And why does he haunt us still?Following the course of Poe’s fascinating, short and tragic life — from his fame as the poet of 'The Raven' to his tortured romances and literary feuds — Emily Ogden dives deep into the mind of a man whose darkness has shaped our world, and interweaves his story with those of the devoted readers who have found solace in his work.'Spellbinding . . . This portrait of Poe will haunt you to the grave and beyond' - Christine Smallwood'Emily Ogden brilliantly exhumes the beating heart of America's darkest poet' - Orlando Reade

Darkness Becomes Bright is an unflinching exploration of horror, the human condition, and how Edgar Allan Poe's haunted legacy might keep us company in moments of darkness.'A wonderfully engaging account of Poe’s troubled life and work . . . Nimble, generous, brimming with insight' - SARAH WATERS'Emily Ogden does not flinch from the obscure and sometimes horrifying recesses of Poe’s psychosis' - SUE PRIDEAUXAre you brave enough to step into the darkness?Edgar Allan Poe did not truly die. In the years since his mysterious demise, his works have captivated millions and spawned the genres of horror and the detective story. His masterpieces — filled with talking ravens and buried women, haunted houses and beating hearts — live on in our imaginations and our nightmares. They are endlessly adapted, parodied and obsessed over.But who was Edgar Allan Poe? And why does he haunt us still?Following the course of Poe’s fascinating, short and tragic life — from his fame as the poet of 'The Raven' to his tortured romances and literary feuds — Emily Ogden dives deep into the mind of a man whose darkness has shaped our world, and interweaves his story with those of the devoted readers who have found solace in his work.'Spellbinding . . . This portrait of Poe will haunt you to the grave and beyond' - Christine Smallwood'Emily Ogden brilliantly exhumes the beating heart of America's darkest poet' - Orlando Reade