20th century literature
A01=Christine Ferguson
Author_Christine Ferguson
Category=DS
Category=QRVK
Category=QRY
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forthcoming
spiritual literature
Transatlantic literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781399567268
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 is Professor of English Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Stirling, where her research focuses on the entwined histories of the literary gothic and the British occult revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is author of Open Secrets: The Popular Fiction of Britain’s Occult Revival (2025), Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing 1848-1930 (2012) and Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (2006). Her previous editions include, with Andrew Radford, The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 (2018), and, as solo editor, a volume on Spiritualism, Health, Race, and Human Variation for Routledge’s Spiritualism 1840-1930 facsimile edition series (2014).
