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

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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 In taking up these questions, Determined Spirits urges us to rethink the long-established and, I argue, outdated assessment of modern spiritualism as a site for the imaginative emancipation of individual identity from the dictates of the physical body.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.