The Victorian Supernatural PDF Download

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

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Author: Simone Natale
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271077395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

Author: Michael Cox
Publisher: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192804472
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Collection of thirty-five English ghost stories written during the Victorian Era.

Author: Vanessa D. Dickerson
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826210814
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
An interesting rereading of familiar texts by Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot recovering the historical and literary roots of the supernatural as it appears in each women's work. Dickerson (English, Rhodes College) makes interesting observations about women's changing roles in the 19th century when scientific advancements relegated women to the home as arbiters of the spiritual while men occupied themselves with "rational" invention. Through close readings, she demonstrates how the Brontes, Gaskell, and Eliot resisted this division and, simultaneously, created a spiritual genre of writing traditionally denigrated by critics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Richard Dalby
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
ISBN: 9780786702794
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Gathers forty of the best English and American ghost stories from the genre's golden age of 1839 to 1910, including works by Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ambrose Bierce. Original.

Author: Everett Franklin Bleiler
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 9780486225586
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Full texts of "The Uninhabited House" by Riddell; "The Amber Witch" by Meinhold; "Monsieur Maurice" by Edwards; "A Phantom Lover" by Lee; and "The Ghost of Muir House" by Beale. 6 illustrations.

Author: Zoe Lehmann Imfeld
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319302191
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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This book argues that theology is central to an understanding of the literary ghost story. Victorian ghost stories have traditionally been read in the context of agnosticism – as stories which reveal a society struggling with Christian orthodoxy in a new ‘Enlightened’ world. This book, however, uses theological ideas from St Augustine through to modern theologians to identify a theological journey taken by the protagonists of such stories, and charts each stage of this journey through the short stories it examines. It also proposes a theory of reader participation which creates an imaginary space in which modern epistemology is suspended. The book studies the work of four major authors of the supernatural tale: Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James.

Author: Rex Collings
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
ISBN: 9781840220667
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter's night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The unquiet souls of the dead, both as fictional creations and as 'real' apparitions, roam the pages of this haunting selection of ghost stories by Rex Collings. Some of these stories are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of tales of the supernatural. There are stories from distant lands - 'Fisher's Ghost' by John Lang is set in Australia and 'A Ghostly Manifestation' by 'A Clergyman' is set in Calcutta. In this selection, Sir Walter Scott (a Victorian in spirit if not in fact), keeps company with Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and other illustrious masters of the genre.

Author: Sarah Bartels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000348040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.

Author: Molly Pohlig
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 125024627X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Molly Pohlig's The Unsuitable is a fierce blend of Gothic ghost story and Victorian novel of manners that’s also pitch perfect for our current cultural moment. Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck. Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands—a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver—a true comedy of errors ensues. As history’s least conventional courtship progresses into talk of marriage, Iseult’s mother becomes increasingly volatile and uncontrollable, and Iseult is forced to resort to extreme, often violent, measures to keep her in check. As the day of the wedding nears, Iseult must decide whether (and how) to set the course of her life, with increasing interference from both her mother and father, tipping her ever closer to madness, and to an inevitable, devastating final act.