The Victorian Supernatural

Nicola Bown teaches Victorian literature and art at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge, 2001). Carolyn Burdett is Principal Lecturer in English at London Metropolitan University. She is the author of Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (2000). Pamela Thurschwell is a lecturer in English at University College London, She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking 1880-1920 (2001) and Sigmund Freud (2000).

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Foreward Gillian Beer; Part I. Supernatural Science: 1. Spiritualism, science and the supernatural in mid-Victorian Britain Richard Noakes; 2. Investigations and fictions: Charles Dickens and ghosts Louise Henson; Part II. Invisible Women: 3. Spectral politics: the Victorian ghost story and the domestic servant Eve M. Lynch; 4. George Eliot's prophecies: coercive second sight and everyday thought reading Pamela Thurschwell; Part III. Raising the Dead: 5. Browning, the dramatic monologue and the resuscitation of the dead Adam Roberts; 6. Baron Corvo and the key to the underworld Colin Cruise; Part IV. Envisioning the Unseen: 7. What is the stuff that dreams are made of? Nicola Bown; 8. Holman Hunt, William Dyce and the image of Christ Michaela Giebelhausen; Part V. Imperial Occult: 9. Knowledge, belief and the supernatural at the imperial margin Roger Luckhurst; 10. Romance, reincarnation and Rider Haggard Carolyn Burdett; Part VI. Haunted modernism: 11. The origins of modernism in the haunted properties of literature Geoffrey Gilbert; 12. Afterword Steven Connor; Bibliography; Index.