Title The sympathetic medium : feminine channeling, the occult, and communication technologies, 1859-1919 / Jill Galvan

Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2010

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 216 pages) : illustrations Contents Introduction: Tuning in to the female medium -- Sympathy and the spiriting of information In the cage -- Securing the line : automatism and cross-cultural encounters in late Victorian Gothic fiction -- Du Maurier's media : the phonographic unconscious on the cusp of the future -- Telltale typing, hysterical channeling : the medium as detective device -- Literary transmission and male mediation Summary "The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with seances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted - in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in seance parlors - by women." "In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers an analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the century. Examining a wide variety of fictional explorations of feminine channeling (in both the technological and supernatural realms) by such authors as Henry James, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, and George Du Maurier, Galvan argues that women were often chosen for that role, or assumed it themselves, because they made at-a-distance dialogues seem more intimate, less mediated." "Two allegedly feminine traits, sympathy and a susceptibility to automatism, enabled women to disappear into their roles as message-carriers. Anchoring her literary analysis in discussions of social, economic, and scientific culture, Galvan finds that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of mediated communication reveals the challenges that the new networked culture presented to prevailing ideas of gender, dialogue, privacy, and the relationship between body and self."--Jacket Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject Channeling (Spiritualism) -- History -- 19th century Women mediums -- History -- 19th century Communication -- Technological innovations -- History -- 19th century Spiritualism in literature. Mediums in literature. Communication in literature. American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. American literature Channeling (Spiritualism) Communication in literature Communication -- Technological innovations English literature Mediums in literature Spiritualism in literature Women mediums Kommunikative Kompetenz Medium Parapsychologie Frau Kommunikationstechnik Occultisme. Vrouwen. Telefonie. Großbritannien USA Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780801458620 0801458625

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