Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Hygiene in Transatlantic Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930

在我提议的AHRC奖学金期间，我将完成我正在撰写的著作《坚定的精神：1848年至1910年跨大西洋精神主义者写作中的优生学、遗传性和种族卫生学》(即将出版，爱丁堡大学出版社，2012年)的两章。这项开创性的跨学科研究考察了19世纪中期至20世纪初的英美唯心主义文学，重点是在优生思想和硬遗传主义进入文化和文学主流之前很久就对这些思想和美学的迷人认可。这本书询问为什么关于理性繁殖、遗传决定论和种族改进的想法在这一时期对唯心主义小说家、记者和传记作家如此重要；它还考察了这些科学和社会关切如何推动新兴的唯心主义美学定义。在回答这些问题时，《坚定的精神》敦促我们重新思考长期确立的、我认为过时的现代唯心主义评估，认为它是将个人身份从肉体的指令中创造性地解放出来的场所。它建立在最近关于灵性主义写作和科学的学术势头的基础上，同时以全新的视角分析两者之间的关系。专著以跨大西洋灵性主义的文学、历史和身体政治的背景讨论开始。现代唯心主义于19世纪40年代末出生于美国，然后迅速传播到全球。现代唯心主义认为，人类不仅在死后保持自己的个人身份，而且还能够与生者联系，提供关于他们现在生活的奇妙和非惩罚性来世的鼓舞人心的信息。19世纪的唯心主义作家不仅局限于关于生命终结的争论，还痴迷于生命的起源，在他们的乌托邦信仰中寻找一种重生人类的公式。他们利用自己的小说、传记和新闻报道作为想象和辩论的平台，主张以精神为导向的婚介，改善身体和性健康，以及宗教和法律上的禁令，禁止复制所谓的“不适合的人”。我的书追溯了这些想法的出现，涉及各种各样罕见的、基本上没有人研究过的灵性小说、新闻、文学评论、自助文学和对来世的通灵描述。它的目的是展示这种唯心论者对决定论社会改革的关注如何预见到20世纪最臭名昭著的生物知识社会应用的思想原理：优生学。它在八个章节的过程中建立了关于唯心主义关于来世和人类越轨的优生地图的论点，其中两章--《黑暗S：幽灵主义者写作中的种族、原始主义和附身》和《罪犯，累犯精神》--将在我提议的AHRC团契期间撰写。一旦完成，我的专著将不仅为维多利亚研究奖学金做出贡献，而且还将为科学史研究、残疾研究和维多利亚时期的期刊研究做出贡献。

During the period of my proposed AHRC fellowship, I will complete two chapters of my book-in-progress Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Hygiene in Transatlantic Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1910 (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, 2012). This ground-breaking interdisciplinary study examines British and American spiritualist literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century, focusing on its fascinating ideological and aesthetic endorsement of eugenic thought and hard hereditarianism long before these ideas entered the cultural and literary mainstream. The book asks why ideas about rational reproduction, hereditary determinism, and race improvement, became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists, and biographers in this period; It also examines how these scientific and social concerns drove emerging spiritualist definitions of the aesthetic. In taking up these questions, Determined Spirits urges us to rethink the long-established and, I argue, outdated assessment of modern spiritualism as a site for the imaginative emancipation of individual identity from the dictates of the physical body. It builds on the momentum of recent scholarship on spiritualist writing and science while analyzing the relationship between the two in a wholly new light.The monograph opens with a contextualizing discussion of transatlantic spiritualism's literature, history and body politics. Born in the United States in the late eighteen forties and then spreading rapidly throughout the globe, modern spiritualism held that human beings not only retained their individual identities after death, but were also capable of contacting the living with inspiring messages about the wondrous and non-punitive afterlife in which they now lived. Far from confining themselves to debates about the end of life, nineteenth-century spiritualist writers were also obsessed with life's origins, seeking in their Utopian faith a formula for regenerating the human race. They used their fiction, biographies, and journalism as platforms from which to imagine and argue for spirit-directed match-making,for improved physical and sexual fitness, and for religious and legal prohibitions against the reproduction of the so-called 'unfit.' My book traces the emergence of these ideas across a wide variety of rare and largely unstudied spiritualist fiction, journalism, literary criticism, self-help literature, and channelled accounts of the afterlife. Its goal is to show how this spiritualist preoccupation with determinist social reform anticipated the ideological tenets of the twentieth-century's most notorious social application of bio-knowledge: eugenics. It builds its argument about spiritualism's eugenic mapping of the afterlife and of human deviance over the course of eight chapters, two of which- 'Dark Séance: Race, Primitivism, and Possession in Spiritualist Writing' and 'Criminal Man, Recidivist Spirits'- will be written during the period of my proposed AHRC fellowship. Once complete, my monograph will be poised to contribute not only to Victorian Studies scholarship, but also to research in the history of science, Disability Studies, and Victorian periodical studies.