Performances of Spiritualism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

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This monograph investigates and explains the powerful influence of the spirits of the dead within the nineteenth-century United States culture. Through a focus on varieties of performance-séances, trance lectures, religious 'theatre', magic lantern shows and other aspects of visual culture such as the phantasmagoria, it reveals the extent to which the culture of the period is haunted by its troubling past - especially by marginalised individuals such as women, Indians and African Americans. It will also locate United States spiritualism, massively popular in the mid-century period, within its transnational context and examine it as early form of cultural imperialism.