As seen in fiction, newspaper accounts, and magic shows, the presence of ghosts pervaded the Victorian period. This book examines supernatural encounters in a wide range of Victorian writers including Dickens and Kipling.
As seen in fiction, newspaper accounts, and magic shows, the presence of ghosts pervaded the Victorian period. This book examines supernatural encounters in a wide range of Victorian writers including Dickens and Kipling. Cadwallader argues that these fictional spirits reflect how Victorians were adapting to rapid scientific and religious changes.
Jen Cadwallader's lively, accessible, and very insightful Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction brilliantly problematises readings of ghost stories as articulations of an agnostic sensibility ... . Cadwallader performs sensitive and careful close readings of these stories, as well as providing a powerful sense of the complexity of the ghost story's position in Victorian culture. I recommend Spirits and the Spiritual in Victorian Fiction very strongly. (Jarlath Killeen, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Vol. 16, 2017)
Jen Cadwallader is Associate Professor of English at Randolph-Macon College, USA.
Introduction: Framing the Ghost Story
1. Physiology, Pharmacology, and the Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu
2. Dickens's Ghosts and the Christmas Spirit
3. The Anatomy of Desire: Madness, Mesmerism, and the Specters of Female Sexuality
4. Mourning the Dead and the Rise of the New Faith
Coda: Cecilia De Noel a nd the Triumph of Experience