The Invention of Telepathy

by Luckhurst, Roger

ISBN13: 9780199249626

ISBN10: 0199249628

Format: Hardcover

Pub. Date: 2002-08-22

Publisher(s): Oxford University Press

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Summary

The Invention of Telepathy explores one of the enduring concepts to emerge from the late nineteenth century. Telepathy was coined by Frederic Myers in 1882. He defined it as 'the communication of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense'. By 1901 ithad become a disputed phenomenon amongst physical scientists yet was the 'royal road' to the unconscious mind. Telepathy was discussed by eminent men and women of the day, including Sigmund Freud, Thomas Huxley, Henry and William James, Mary Kingsley, Andrew Lang, Vernon Lee, W. T. Stead, and OscarWilde. Did telepathy signal evolutionary advance or possible decline? Could it be a means of binding the Empire closer together, or was it used by natives to subvert imperial communications? Were women more sensitive than men, and if so why? Roger Luckhurst investigates these questions in anexciting and accessible study that mixes history of science with cultural history and literary analysis.

Author Biography

Roger Luckhurst is Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London, and co-editor of Roger of The Fin-de-Siecle (OUP, 2000).

List of Figures

Introduction

(8)

Part I

Terrains of Emergence, 1870-1882

(51)

The Settlement of Scientific Naturalism

(5)

Institutions of Science

(5)

Fragilities

(2)

William Crookes---Chemist, Spectroscopist, and Spiritualist

(8)

Dirty Tricks?

(5)

The Darwin Seance, 1874

(7)

The Lankester Seance and the Trial of Henry Slade, 1876

(3)

The Psychological Society of Great Britain, 1875-1879

(4)

Sociological Pathways: Founding the Society for Psychical Research

(9)

Coining Telepathy: Concept and Elaboration, 1882-1901

(57)

Immediate Resources: Mind-Readers and Parlour Games

(8)

Black-Boxing Telepathy

(6)

Discursive Levers I: The Physics of Inter-phenomena

(17)

Discursive Levers II: Vanishing Points in Fin-de-Siecle Psychology

(15)

The Myers Synthesis: Telepathy and the Subliminal Consciousness

107

(5)

Out of the Knot, and into the Territory

112

(5)

Part II

Making Connections: W. T. Stead's Occult Economies

117

(31)

High and Low

117

(5)

'In Touch with Life at All Points': Stead's Trajectory

122

(9)

Affective Journalism

131

(4)

The Edge of the Electric Future

135

(5)

The Tie that Binds the World

140

(8)

Telepathic Doxai: Knowledge and Belief at the Imperial Margin

148

(33)

'Where Are the Letters?'

148

(6)

The Phantasmal Empire

154

(6)

Andrew Lang: Psycho-folklorist

160

(7)

Mary Kingsley and the 'Capacity to Think in Black'

167

(6)

Rudyard Kipling's Gossip-Tales

173

(8)

Psychical Research and the Late Victorian Gothic

181

(33)

Generic Reactions: The Resistance to Theory?

186

(4)

Degrees of Ambivalence: Robert Louis Stevenson

190

(6)

Grant Allen

196

(3)

Arthur Machen

199

(5)

Trance-Texts: Distant Influence as Gothic Trope

204

(4)

Remote Control Victorians: The Beetle and Dracula

208

(6)

The Woman Sensitive: Nerves, New Women, and Henry James

214

(38)

'The Finer Characters of Psychic Life'

215

(4)

Valences of the New Woman

219

(8)

Entanglements with Mediums

227

(7)

'I Too Was a ``Sensitive''': William, Henry, and Alice James

234

(3)

After 1890: The Psychical Jameses

237

(4)

Henry James's Romances of Occult Relation

241

(11)

Afterlives, 1901-1934

252

(27)

The Death and Life of Frederic Myers

253

(3)

Modernism, Psychism, and the Occult Revival

256

(8)

Cross-correspondence and Collage

264

(6)

Freud's Little Local Difficulty

270

(9)

Bibliography

279

(40)

Index

319