The Invention of Telepathy explores one of the enduring concepts to emerge from the late nineteenth century. Telepathy was coined by Frederic Myers in 1882. He defined it as 'the communication of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense'. By 1901 it had become a disputed phenomenon amongst physical scientists yet was the 'royal road' to the unconscious mind. Telepathy was discussed by eminent men and women of the day, including Sigmund Freud, Thomas Huxley, Henry and William James, Mary Kingsley, Andrew Lang, Vernon Lee, W.T. Stead, and Oscar Wilde. Did telepathy signal evolutionary advance or possible decline? Could it be a means of binding the Empire closer together, or was it used by natives to subvert imperial communications? Were women more sensitive than men, and if so why? Roger Luckhurst investigates these questions in a study that mixes history of science with cultural history and literary analysis.

Nineteenth-century life and literature are full of strange accounts that describe the act of one person thinking about another as an ethically problematic, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do. In this book, Adela Pinch explains why, when, and under what conditions it is possible, or desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect them. She explains why nineteenth-century British writers - poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, devotees of the occult - were both attracted to and repulsed by radical or substantial notions of purely mental relations between persons, and why they moralized about the practice of thinking about other people in interesting ways. Working at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy, this book both sheds new light on a neglected aspect of Victorian literature and thought, and explores the consequences of, and the value placed on, this strand of thinking about thinking.

Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd. The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of “primitive cultures” that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs.

This book explores the history of literature as a history of changing media and modes of communication, from manuscript to print, from the codex to the computer, and from paper to digital platforms. It argues that literature has evolved, and continues to evolve, in sync with material forms and formats that engage our senses in multiple ways. Because literary experiences are embedded in, and enabled by, media, the book focuses on literature as a changing combination of material and immaterial features. The principal agents of this history are no longer genres, authors, and texts but configurations of media and technologies. In telling the story of these combinations from prehistory to the present, Ingo Berensmeyer distinguishes between three successive dominants of media usage that have shaped literary history: performance, representation, and connection. Using English literature as a test case for a long view of media history, this book combines an unusual bird’s eye view across periods with illuminating readings of key texts. It will prove an invaluable resource for teaching and for independent study in English or comparative literature and media studies.

Using a wide range of unexplored archival material, this book examines the 'spectral' influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on women's writing, analyzing the ways in which modern writers have both subverted and mimicked nineteenth century sources in their evocation of the séance.

Jill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body. Although the new materialist psychology of the mid-nineteenth century made possible the very concept of a wound to the psyche - the recognition, for example, that those who escaped physically unscathed from train crashes or other overwhelming experiences might still have been injured in some significant way - it was Victorian fiction, with its complex explorations of the inner life of the individual and accounts of upheavals in personal identity, that most fully articulated the idea of the haunted, possessed and traumatized subject. This wide-ranging book reshapes our understanding of Victorian theories of mind and memory and reveals the relevance of nineteenth-century culture to contemporary theories of trauma.

Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian search for life after death is the first full-length biography of Frederic W.H. Myers, leading figure in the Society for Psychical Research and friend and associate of Browning, Gladstone, Ruskin, Tennyson, Swinburne, Henry James, Prince Leopold and other influential Victorians. The book offers a fascinating insight into a key period in the development of Victorian thought. Among many things it covers: 1. Extraordinary Phenomena Myers investigated extraordinary phenomena, much of which is still reported today: out of body experiences and astral projection, near death experiences, poltergeists, gurus like Madame Blavatsky claiming strange powers, mediums both private and public, and haunted houses (for example, the giant warrior haunting a chateau near Heidelberg, the Cheltenham Ghost that was seen by a considerable number of people, and the odd doings at Ballechin House in Scotland which caused a scandal in the press. 2. Life After Death Investigations Myers believed he had virtually proved life after death by a) the link he thought established between hundreds of apparitions and living or dead human beings b) the messages that the outstanding mediums Mrs Piper and Mrs Thompson gave him from his first great love Annie and his intimate friend and co-worker Edmund Gurney which contained information the medium could not know and was delivered in a way highly characteristic of the personality concerned. 3. Automatic Writing Some researchers have claimed that he has returned after death and proved his continued existence through the automatic writings of a number of mediums in England, America, India. These writings continued for thirty years. 4. Romance & Suicide There is also love, tragedy and jealousy in Myers' life. His first great love Annie, a married woman, committed suicide and Myers' wife, a rather possessive person, tried to prevent any detail about this being made public after his death, even though the relationship was platonic. This inhibited the work of researchers who were trying to verify the 'post-mortem' communications from Myers, since, for many years, they could not check the facts. 5. Credibility Myers researches led him to forming a view about human personality and psychology which Aldous Huxley has said is much richer than Freud's.