1864 Clairvoyance, or somnambulic vision: its art & culture with rules for its attainment.

The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension describes the development and proliferation of the idea of higher dimensional space in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. An idea from mathematics that was appropriated by occultist thought, it emerged in the fin de siècle as a staple of genre fiction and influenced a number of important Modernist writers and artists. Providing a context for thinking of space in dimensional terms, the volume describes an active interplay between self-fashioning disciplines and a key moment in the popularisation of science. It offers new research into spiritualism and the Theosophical Society and studies a series of curious hybrid texts. Examining works by Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and others, the volume explores how new theories of the possibilities of time and space influenced fiction writers of the period, and how literature shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn. A timely study of the interplay between philosophy, literature, culture, and mathematics, it offers a rich resource for readers interested in nineteenth century literature, Modernist studies, science fiction, and gothic scholarship.

List of members in v.1-19, 21, 24-

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thoughtStudying 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.

Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.

Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

Victorian Literary Mesmerism offers eleven interdisciplinary essays on the intersections between mesmerism and nineteenth-century literature. Its scope is complex and ambitious: ranging from considerations of the impact of literature on quasi-scientific writings of the early 1800s, to a study of Arthur Conan Doyle's use of ‘magnetic' ideas at the fin de siècle . The collection boldly leaps across generic, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries; essays on George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell sit snugly besides studies of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins. Medicine, the law, spiritualism, physics, and literature are all discussed in light of their respective impact on Australian, British, and American history.