Recent Studies in Nineteenth‐Century Spiritualism

Abstract

Inaugurated some thirty years ago, the massive resurgence of scholarly interest in nineteenth‐century Spiritualism – a once‐derided heterodox movement which offered believers the opportunity to speak with the dead – continues to gain momentum as we reach the second decade of the twenty‐first century. This article examines how twenty‐first century feminist, cultural studies, post‐structuralist, and periodical studies approaches to the movement develop and differ from those of both its nineteen‐eighties recoverers and indeed its nineteenth‐century practitioners and adherents. What is at stake, intellectually, politically, and ethically, in the ways in which contemporary critics now interrogate and align transatlantic practices of mediumship and séance communication? In particular, I trace the growing challenge to the long‐ubiquitous and near‐exclusive emphasis on the movement’s feminist and proleptically radical dimensions, one which, however laudable in its progressive ambitions, has nonetheless tended to over‐homogenize Spiritualism’s chaotically diverse political and philosophical identifications and to sometimes skew our understanding of its constituency. Recent moves to republish and digitize rare works from the transatlantic Spiritualist archive have the potential to remedy this situation, not by installing an univocal Ur‐meaning for the movement, but by revealing new areas of dynamic tension and cross‐fertilization within it.

Religion, education and the post-secular child

“…The accentuation of their spiritual qualities in the art and writing of the preceding era created just the right conditions for children to be accepted by the Spiritualist Churches as the obvious intermediaries between the realms of the living and the dead. When the apparitions spoke to Kate and Margaret Fox in New York in 1848, initiating the Spiritualist craze, they were doing no more than sowing ground long prepared by a particular set of juxtapositions of children and specific modes of understanding and communication reserved to them in this potent tradition of thought and belief (Ferguson, 2012). As Coleridge had recognised long before, seeing children in this way was bound 'to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural…' (1984, p. 314).…”