Science of the seance : transnational networks and gendered bodies in the study of psychic phenomena, 1918-40 / Beth A. Robertson.
- Title
- Science of the seance : transnational networks and gendered bodies in the study of psychic phenomena, 1918-40 / Beth A. Robertson.
- Published by
- Vancouver, BC : UBC Press, [2016]
- Author
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Displaying 1 item
| Status | Format | Access | Call number | Item location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status | FormatText | AccessRequest in advance | Call numberBF1028 .R63 2016 | Item locationOff-site |
Details
- Description
- x, 242 pages; 24 cm
- Summary
- "Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a group of men and women who sought to transform the séance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project. Her findings cast new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in the 1920s and '30s. She reveals a world inhabited, on one side, by psychical researchers who represented themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body and, on the other, by mediums and ghostly subjects who could and did challenge the researchers' exclusive claims to scientific expertise and authority."--
- Subject
- Contents
- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Groping in the dark: an introduction -- 1. The "scientific self": performative masculinity in the physical laboratory -- 2. Otherworldly subjects: mediums and spirits -- 3. A touch of the uncanny: sensing a material otherworld -- 4. The qualities of quartz: technology, inscriptions, and mechanizing vision -- 5. Fragments of spectral self: psychology, medicine, and aberrant souls -- 6. Teleplasmic mechanics: spirit scientists and vital technologies -- The Knot Unravelled: an epilogue.
- Owning institution
- Harvard Library
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Additional formats (note)
- Issued also in electronic formats.
- Processing action (note)
- committed to retain