Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920

[Dave Monroe]

Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (No. 32)
Pamela Thurschwell
University College London
Hardback (ISBN-13: 9780521801683 | ISBN-10: 0521801680)

Also available in Paperback  | eBook format

In this book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary
culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle.
Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public
imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they seemed to support
the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on
the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact
between people: both seemed to involve ‘magical thinking’. Thurschwell
looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of
the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry
James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of
psychoanalysis. This study offers new and provocative interpretations
of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific culture in relation to
psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural history.
Contents

Introduction; 1. Severing the wire: the Society for Psychical
Research's experiments in intimacy; 2. New forms of outrage: hypnotic
aesthetes and the 1890s; 3. 'That Imperial stomach is no seat for
ladies': James's wars, James's ghosts; 4. Henry James and Theodora
Bosanquet: on the typewriter, in the cage, at the Ouija board; 5.
Psychoanalysis's dangerous proximities: telepathy, psychosis and the
real event; Bibliography.

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521022439

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521801680

http://books.google.com/books?id=RzuoA8fHoe8C