Description
Book SynopsisExamines the Spiritualist movement''s role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thoughtStudying 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.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; List of Figures; Series Editor's Preface; Introduction; Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium; Spirits in Mind: Madness, Idiocy, and the Cultural Capital of Ignorance; Eugenic Summer Lands: Sexual Reproduction and Family Engineering in the Spheres; Blended Souls: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Occult Miscegenation; Criminal Man and Recidivist Spirit: Spiritualism, Criminal Anthropology, and Thanato-Rehabilitationism; Dead Letters: Bio-Aesthetics and the New Realism in Fin-de-Siecle Spiritualism; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
