Determined Spirits by Christine Ferguson
Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought.Studying transatlantic spiritualist literature from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, Christine Ferguson focuses on its incorporation and dissemination of bio-determinist and eugenic thought. She asks why ideas about rational reproduction, hereditary determinism and race improvement became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists and biographers in this period. She also examines how these concerns drove emerging Spiritualist understandings of disability, intelligence, crime, conception, the afterlife and aesthetic production. The book draws on rare material, including articles and serialized 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.Key Features: *The first major study of Transatlantic Spiritualism's sustained commitment to eugenics, bio-determinism and hard hereditarianism *Devotes a chapter to eugenic and raciological writing of Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African-American Rosicrucian and sex magician whose work has only recently been rediscovered by scholars * Interdisciplinary and historicist methodology * The rich transatlantic reading demonstrates the continuity and influence between British and American Spiritualist writings on the body, reproduction and mental fitness-
Suffragist Artists in Partnership
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The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature
- Walter Pater
- Spirit Becomes Matter
- William Morris and the Idea of Community
- Jane Morris
- Moving Images
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Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature
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New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832 1860
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The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage
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Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature
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The Fin-De-Siecle Scottish Revival
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The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry
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Rudyard Kipling's Fiction
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London's Underground Spaces
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Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain
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Victorian Auto/Biography
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Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883-1920
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Gender, Technology and the New Woman
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Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry
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Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
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Novel Institutions
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Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London
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The Victorian Male Body
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The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism
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Blasted Literature
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Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
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Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status
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The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry
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In Lady Audley's Shadow
Christine Ferguson is Professor of English Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Stirling, where her research focuses on the entwined histories of the literary gothic and the British occult revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is author of Open Secrets: The Popular Fiction of Britain’s Occult Revival (2025), Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing 1848-1930 (2012) and Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (2006). Her previous editions include, with Andrew Radford, The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 (2018), and, as solo editor, a volume on Spiritualism, Health, Race, and Human Variation for Routledge’s Spiritualism 1840-1930 facsimile edition series (2014).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781399567268 |
| ISBN 10 | 1399567268 |
| Title | Determined Spirits |
| Author | Christine Ferguson |
| Series | Edinburgh Critical Studies In Victorian Culture |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
| Year published | 2026-07-31 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |