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

在我提议的AHRC奖学金期间，我将完成我的书的两章，在进行中确定的精神：优生学，遗传，和种族卫生在跨大西洋的精神写作，1848-1910（即将出版的爱丁堡大学出版社，2012）。这项开创性的跨学科研究考察了从19世纪中期到20世纪初的英美唯心主义文学，重点关注其对优生思想和硬遗传主义的迷人意识形态和美学认可，这些思想早在这些思想进入文化和文学主流之前就已经存在了。这本书询问了为什么理性再生产、遗传决定论和种族改良等观念在这一时期对唯心主义小说家、记者和传记作家变得如此重要；它还研究了这些科学和社会问题是如何推动新兴的唯心主义美学定义的。在接受这些问题的过程中，《坚定的精神》敦促我们重新思考对现代唯心论的长期建立的，我认为是过时的评估，将其作为一个想象中的个人身份从肉体的支配中解放出来的场所。它建立在最近关于唯心写作和科学的学术研究的基础上，同时以一种全新的视角分析了两者之间的关系。这本专著以跨大西洋唯心论的文学、历史和身体政治的语境化讨论开始。现代唯心论于19世纪40年代末在美国诞生，然后迅速传遍全球。它认为，人类不仅在死后保留了自己的个人身份，而且还能够与活着的人联系，传递有关他们现在生活的奇妙而无惩罚的来世的鼓舞人心的信息。19世纪的唯心论作家们不仅局限于讨论生命的终结，他们还痴迷于生命的起源，在他们的乌托邦信仰中寻求人类重生的公式。他们用自己的小说、传记和新闻作为平台，来想象和争论由精神引导的相亲，提高身体和性健康，以及宗教和法律禁止所谓的“不合适”的繁殖。我的书追溯了这些思想在各种罕见的、基本上未经研究的唯心主义小说、新闻、文学批评、自助文学以及对来世的通灵叙述中的出现。它的目标是展示这种唯心主义者对决定论社会改革的关注是如何预示了20世纪生物知识最臭名昭著的社会应用的意识形态原则：优生学。它在八章的过程中建立了关于唯心论对来世和人类越轨行为的优生学映射的论点，其中两章-“黑暗的s<s:1>：种族，原始主义和唯心论写作中的占有”和“罪犯，累犯精神”-将在我提议的AHRC奖学金期间完成。一旦完成，我的专著不仅将为维多利亚研究奖学金做出贡献，而且还将为科学史、残疾研究和维多利亚期刊研究做出贡献。

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 In taking up these questions, Determined Spirits urges us to rethink the long-established and, I argue, outdated assessment of modern spiritualism as a site for the imaginative emancipation of individual identity from the dictates of the physical body.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