Overview

Hallucination was always the ghost story’s elephant in the room. Even before the vogue for psychical research and spiritualism began to influence writers at the end of the nineteenth century, tales of horror and the supernatural, of ghosts and demons, had been haunted by the possibility of some grand deception by the senses. But what is certainly true is that, during the nineteenth century, hallucination took on a new force and significance not just in ghost stories and horror fiction, but in other forms of writing. Authors began to encourage their readers to assess whether the ghostly had its origins in some supernatural phenomenon from beyond the grave, or from some deception within our own minds. This wide-ranging book explores the many factors which contributed to this rise in the interest in hallucination and visionary experience, during the nineteenth century and beyond. Through a series of close and often unusual readings of numerous writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and Arthur Machen, this original study explores what happened when hallucination appeared in fiction, and – even more importantly – why it happened at all.

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9781845196776

Table of Contents

Reviews

... it illuminates the relationship between the pioneers of psychical research as they grappled with issues of veridicality and hallucination in attempting to tease out the complexities of our understanding of life after death, and the writers who drew on the SPRs publications as a resource. - Tom Ruffles, Society for Psychical Research

"""Oliver Tearles book is based on close readings of the texts, and makes abundant references to contemporary thinkers and novelists, and to the criticism on Gothic fiction. It gives a good idea of what Gothic writing strategies are."" - Nathalie Saudo-Welby, Universite de Picardie-Jules-Verne (Amiens), Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire Du Monde Anglophone"

Author Information

Oliver Tearle is a research student at Loughborough University. He has been published in such journals as Notes and Queries and the Modern Language Review, and has contributed to the online Literary Encyclopedia. Future projects include the co-editing (with John Schad) of a volume of creative-critical essays as part of the Critical Inventions series published by Sussex Academic Press (full details of the series available on the Press website).

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