Opening with an account of the emergence of spiritualist practice in nineteenth-century America and Britain, Chapter 6 analyses the range of sonic phenomena – from raps and taps to more elaborate musical manifestations – which were frequently used to register the supposed presence of spiritual phenomena in séances. To date, cultural histories of attempted communications with the dead have tended to focus on the technological appropriations or extra-sensory abilities which were believed necessary to access the spirit realm, while overlooking the profound social, emotional, bodily, and sensory experiences associated with the intimate space of the Victorian séance. This chapter, in contrast, is dedicated to the human, rather than the technological, connections forged by the séance, and the profound desire on the part of many séance attendees to obviate the need for spiritual telegraphy altogether by once more realising the actual physical and intellectual intimacy that technology could only simulate.

It is well known that tales of the occult and the supernatural provided Charles Dickens with an ideal forum in which to explore the mysterious workings of the human mind, body, and nervous system. Although Dickens’s imaginative explorations of spectral encounters can be firmly tied to his preoccupation with the operations of the mind, this chapter demonstrates that Dickens nonetheless actively drew upon spiritualist modes of thought and practice in his writing. This is most notable, I argue, in Dickens’s meditations on the nature of the creative ‘spirit’ as a kind of presence to be overheard and in his use of sound in facilitating strange or seemingly supernatural experiences. A self-confessed voice-hearer and ghost-seer, Dickens frequently positions both himself and his characters, most especially those upon their deathbeds, as highly sensitive listeners, alert to, indeed eager to encounter, the possibilities of vibrations beyond the ordinary.

In contrast to what several recent interpreters suggest, Hegel would reject the labels “naturalism,” “essentialist naturalism,” and “naturalist essentialism” for his philosophy. In light of the architecture of his system, the label “essentialist naturalism” would commit him to a variety of physicalism, which he rejects on the grounds of physics’ inability to establish the compatibility of material bodies and physical form. Second, as his critique of nature’s most concrete category “the death of the individual animal” and the sublation of nature into Geist illustrate, Hegel deems nature incapable of reconciling the individuals’ particularity with the genus’ universality, and therefore associates the realm of nature with death and proceeds to sublate nature into the concept of Geist. Finally, pointing out the inability of objectivist essentialist metaphysics to consistently unite the universal with the particular, Hegel also rejects the metaphysics of “naturalist essentialism” and proposes a concept-metaphysical account of the relationship between the logical idea, nature, and Geist. As all of these are variations of the idea, this proves him to be an idealist rather than a naturalist or a spiritualist.

After a contextual overview of events in 1924, the legacy of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along (starring Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles) on other Black musicals, including Runnin’ Wild, featuring Adelaide Hall and Elisabeth Welch, and Dinah, in which Gertrude Saunders introduced the Black Bottom dance, is discussed. Next is an introduction to the revue genre, with examples including Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1923, the Shubert’s Artists and Models and Charlot’s London Calling!, all of which played into 1924.

The theories of Darwin and Wallace were similar, both seeing evolutionary change coming about as a function of a differential reproduction fueled by the pressure to succeed in the struggle for existence.  Darwin and Wallace came to their thinking independently.  The behavior of both men, in what could have been a tense situation, was exemplary.  Wallace sent his paper to Darwin, a postal journey from the Far East to England that took far longer than people expect.  This has led to beliefs that Darwin sat unfairly on the paper, perhaps using it to burnish his own work.  In truth, upon its receipt, Darwin quickly contacted his senior friends Lyell and Herschel, offering to let Wallace have full priority.  Lyell and Hooker arranged for Wallace’s paper and unaltered, pertinent abstracts of Darwin’s earlier writings to be published together in the journal of the Linnaean Society.  Both Darwin and Wallace always felt that matters had been dealt with speedily and honorably.  That said, there were significant differences in the thinking of Darwin and Wallace.  The latter was never comfortable with the metaphor of selection, he always embraced group selection in opposition to Darwin’s determined individual selectionist thinking, and most famously – notoriously – Wallace turned to spiritualism to explain human evolution, spurring Darwin to give an entirely naturalistic explanation is his Descent of Man.

Pirandello is one of the most famous and important cultural figures of Italian modernism, and his work is deeply invested in responding to the rapidly changing forces of modernization. This chapter examines his complex relationship with modernity through a comparison to the Italian avant-garde movement of Futurism: Where the Futurists were focused on using their cultural production to usher in and intensify processes of technological modernization, Pirandello’s stance is more complex and ambivalent. The chapter thus traces their responses to a shared set of cultural conditions, spanning from a shared rejection of scientific materialism and positivism to engagement with new models of sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and finally considers their divergent views of cinema and the promise of technology to transform the future.

Lev Tolstoy was not hostile to the natural sciences, although the impression that he was is understandable given his critical remarks about contemporary medicine. Throughout his life, Tolstoy remained consistently aware of developments in the natural sciences, and if some of his polemical representations about them are taken out of context, it is possible to misinterpret his positions. This chapter places three of his more prominent negative engagements with the sciences in context to show how those views emerged from specific local circumstances. First, his dismissal of university education in the sciences is juxtaposed with his own education in Kazan. Second, his very prominent rejection in Anna Karenina of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection adopted a specific ethical stance in the context of a vibrant Russian debate about the biological and philosophical limitations of Darwinism. And, finally, his satirizing of séances and “spiritualism” in his play The Fruits of Enlightenment is examined as emerging from his domestic surroundings.

Chapter 12 applies what we have learned from prehistory to explain why religions exist and how they emerged and persisted into the present day even while their precepts are clearly contrary to all that we have learned from science. Looking at the present human challenges of warfare and terrorism from an evolutionary standpoint helps readers to better understand and deal with the problems of our modern globalized world.

This chapter explores the intersection between American horror and religion and how our understanding can benefit from an approach that recognizes how both subjects wrestle with what happens when human experience goes sideways, how people attempt to understand things beyond their experience, and how they address questions pertaining to why they are here and where they think they are going. While both clearly confront such key questions of human existence, religion frequently addresses them within expectations tied to core doctrines, beliefs, and practices, while horror more often reaches beyond those limits. And yet there are moments in which both kinds of texts overlap in that they share an interest in the kinds of overwhelming questions people ask in times of concern or crisis. This chapter explores several of those moments in a survey that ranges from American Puritan literature to Spiritualism, and then to the rise of modern Pentecostalism.

The Elmhirsts emerged from the First World War feeling that orthodox Christianity was no longer adequate as a guide either to belief or to conduct. Like others of their era, they looked for new forms of spiritual meaning, a new guide to moral behaviour, new sources of affective or social fulfilment and different frameworks for understanding the nature of society as a whole. Collectively, this chapter terms these searches ‘socio-spiritual questing’. It considers four approaches taken at Dartington to filling the gap left by Christianity. The Elmhirsts tried re-shaping the Church with the help of the arts, explored the possibilities of Eastern spirituality, worked to advance humankind’s unity through group spiritual exploration and experimented with a planned regime of ‘psycho-physical hygiene’. Interwar socio-spiritual questing was so wide-ranging and amorphous that it defies comprehensive survey. Dartington Hall provides an alternative way of drawing together its various strands: an unusual convergence in a diffuse landscape of seeking.

In 1924, a wealthy New York philanthropist, Dorothy Straight (née Elmhirst), married a Yorkshire-born agricultural economist, Leonard Elmhirst. The First World War had made both of them question the self-oriented, market-driven doctrine of laissez-faire liberalism that underpinned the Western world. ‘I found that the bottom of life had dropped out,’ Leonard Elmhirst wrote, ‘and that the old beliefs could not stand the test’. Both wanted to dedicate themselves to creating a community apart from mainstream society, where a better mode of holistically integrated, democratic living could be pioneered. In 1925 they bought a run-down estate in South Devon, Dartington Hall, and began a social, cultural and education experiment that they hoped would ‘set the pace’ for Britain and the rest of the world. They devoted the rest of their lives to this project, which became one of the best-known and most influential of the many small-scale interwar utopian experiments.

Chapter 4 shows dinosaurs’ link to concerns about secularisation and specialisation contributed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous romance The Lost World. It argues that the text can be understood in relation to Conan Doyle’s romantic approach to scientific knowledge, especially his strident anti-materialism and aversion to technical jargon. Examining archival material from New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, including the original manuscript, Fallon weaves the content of The Lost World together in surprising ways with Conan Doyle’s palaeontological forays, cryptozoological sightings, and interest in psychical research, showing that noting the differences between the US and UK serialised and book versions provides a more precise understanding of Conan Doyle’s intended romantic effects. In particular, Fallon emphasises the illustrations by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Patrick Forbes. Alongside the text, these subtle and meticulously planned images make clear the author’s desire to convince readers that the world is full of unexplained wonders. As such, the British book edition in which Forbes’s images appear was, for Conan Doyle, the correct way to experience The Lost World.

Aristotle identifies perception as central to all animals, enabling them to fulfill their ends. His biological works clarify his hylomorphic account of perception as a key activity of the soul by providing detailed overviews of types of perception and perceptual organs. Like other bodily organs, these have complex structures comprised of physical components, often in layers, all ultimately involving the four basic elements. I defend a compromise position on scholarly controversies about whether Aristotle can successfully provide a physicalist account of perception. Briefly, the answer is “yes and no.” His biological works, along with “chemical” works, do give physical accounts of perceptible features like colors and tastes, as well as of the organs (and parts) capable of registering them. However, because of his teleological views about nature, such accounts must be “top-down” and are never purely reductive or translatable into structural accounts like those of the atomists. Finally, we must remember that perception is crucial to the behavioral success of the animal as a whole within its environment. Perceptual “experience” in our modern sense does not occur in any organ but rather in the body as a whole, and more centrally in the heart and blood vessels.

This chapter analyzes the Victorian figure of the female medium as another embodiment of wayward reading. In both nonfictional and fictional portrayals of telepathy, or “brain-reading,” female mediums represent a model of identification that is neither passive nor manipulative but defensive. This model also provides a corrective to recent popular accounts of scientific studies that conflate enhanced Theory of Mind (the ability to recognize and interpret the beliefs and emotional states of other people) with actual compassion as an effect of reading literature. Though mediums sometimes represented their ability to communicate with dead and distant minds as an unwanted gift, accounts of spiritualism depict telepathy as directed and purposeful, and not always sympathetic. In her memoir novelist and actress Florence Marryat recounts using clairvoyance in order to understand the disposition and plans of both declared and secret enemies. Mina, the heroine of Dracula (1897), can reverse the direction of mind-reading between herself and the villainous Count, and use her access to his perspective to help defeat him. The feminized type of the Victorian medium deploys her stereotypical sensitivity not always as an effusion of beneficent feeling but as a social strategy to protect herself from predatory and intrusive others.

The development of the Victorian ghost story can be contextualised in relation to an array of interleaving discourses of the unseen: the science of optics; the advent of new, invisible technologies that constituted a form of modern supernatural; and the rise of Spiritualism and the pseudo-scientific investigation of the paranormal. Many ghost story writers explored, even embraced, the spectral effects of modernity and the ghost story flourished in an historical moment when scientific and technological progress was shadowed by the occult. For women writers, the ghost story is a tale of increasing visibility and opportunity: in a climate of social and political reform, women occupied a prominent role in the genre, exploiting the growing appetite for popular and marketable writing, particularly in shorter forms. The chapter explores how the Victorian ghost story provided an often oblique vision of gender and class inequalities, and raised fundamental questions about faith and knowledge.

This chapter offers a survey of a full century of Gothic entertainments, including shows such as the phantasmagoria, Pepper’s Ghost, the magic theatre, and theatrical séances, as well as macabre shows in penny gaffs, fairgrounds and the first screening venues for early films. In relation to this variety of entertainments, it argues for an open definition of Gothic, pointing out that it was the adaptability of Gothic registers that proved so productive for nineteenth-century showmen and women, allowing them routinely to attract audiences at all sorts of venues and as tastes changed across the decades. Drawing on a wide range of primary research in newspapers, the chapter also reconsiders the relationship between these patterns of ‘Gothic showmanship’, and the mass media spectacles delivered by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century magic- lantern shows and early film. Such media demonstrated continuities with Gothic shows of the preceding century, but also with the eclecticism of late twentieth and twenty-first-century Gothic mass media, suggesting a long trajectory for patterns of Gothic showmanship that is worthy of further consideration.

Was there an indigenous Gothic in nineteenth-century Italy, a local reworking of English (and perhaps Continental) forms and models’? This chapter addresses this much-debated issue by making a case for the clear presence of Gothic motifs and structures in several Italian novels, from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) (particularly in its earliest version, Fermo e Lucia, c. 1821–3) to Carlo Lorenzini’s Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883). The chapter discusses the contribution of the so-called ‘Scapigliati’ authors to the Italian Gothic and offers a survey of later writers from the verista and naturalista literary schools. Later in the century, Italian realist writers seem to veer into the realm of the supernatural. The chapter thus closes with looking at the anti-rationalist discourses that flourished at the close of the century, and at such hermeneutical modalities as spiritualism, mesmerism and occultism that became increasingly fashionable in the popular press. Vampire literature and the Italian legacy of German and English Gothic are also addressed, with references to, among others, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and the national novelists of the first half of the century.