Series Editor: Julian WolfreysDrawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth-century's literature and culture.

DETERMINED SPIRITS
Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930

Christine Ferguson

'The reach of eugenics extended beyond the grave. Illuminating the dark rooms of spiritualist séances, this important study contests the fashionable representation of transatlantic Spiritualism as "subversive" and "progressive", and reveals the surprising links between speaking to the dead and silencing the living.'
Elana Gomel, Department of English and American Studies, Tel-Aviv University

'This bold work demolishes many of our preconceptions about spiritualism by actually reading the wonderful, bizarre publications of the spiritualists themselves. Ferguson's revelations will require everyone who is interested in gender, nationality, or eugenics in this context to rethink their assumptions.'
Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University

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

Studying transatlantic spiritualist literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Christine Ferguson focuses on the incorporation and dissemination of bio-determinist and eugenic thought. The book draws on rare material, including articles and serialised 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.

Christine Ferguson is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her previous publications include the monograph Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue (2006).

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Acknowledgements; List of Figures; Series Editor's Preface; Introduction;
Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium; Spirits in Mind: Madness, Idiocy, and the Cultural Capital of Ignorance; Eugenic Summer Lands: Sexual Reproduction and Family Engineering in the Spheres; Blended Souls: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Occult Miscegenation; Criminal Man and Recidivist Spirit: Spiritualism, Criminal Anthropology, and Thanato-Rehabilitationism; Dead Letters: Bio-Aesthetics and the New Realism in Fin-de-Siècle Spiritualism; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.