Ghosts and Things (eBook)

The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism

Aviva Briefel (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
270 Seiten
Cornell University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5017-8028-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Ghosts and Things argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, séances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to specialized technologies invented to register the presence of spirits. In its supernatural object lessons, Victorian spiritualism was not just a mystical movement centered on the dead but also a practical resource for learning how to negotiate the uncanniness of life under capitalism.

Aviva Briefel explores how spiritualism compelled séance participants to speculate on the manufacture of spectral clothing; ponder the hidden histories and energies of parlor furniture; confront the humiliations of consumerism as summoned spirits pelted them with exotic fruits; and comprehend modes of mechanical reproduction, like photography and electrotyping, that had the power to shape identities. Briefel argues that spiritualist practices and the objects they employed offered both believers and skeptics unexpected frameworks for grappling with the often-invisible forces of labor, consumption, exploitation, and exchange that haunted their everyday lives.

Ghosts and Things reveals how spiritualism's explorations of the borderland between life and death, matter and spirit, produced a strange and seductive combination of wonder and discomfort that allowed participants to experience the possibilities and precarities of industrial modernity in novel ways.

Autor

Aviva Briefel is Edward Little Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Deceivers and The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination.

Inhalt

Introduction: The Strange Matterof Victorian Ghosts
1. "Freaks of Furniture": The ErraticEnergy of Haunted Things
2. The Things They Carried: ObjectLessons of the Apport Séance
3. Cabinets of Wonder and Exposure: The Davenport Brothers and HenryBox Brown
4. Body Building: The Ghost in the Ageof Mechanical Reproduction
5. Dressing the Ghost: Evidence andSpectral Clothing
Epilogue: Ghosted!

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.4.2025
• Zusatzinfo: 27 b&w halftones
• Verlagsort: Ithaca
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: capitalism, materialism, séance, supernatural, Victorian era, British history, racial identity, cultural appropriation
• ISBN-10: 1-5017-8028-X / 150178028X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-8028-8 / 9781501780288