Cover; Copyright; Contents; Illustrations; Series Editor's Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1 Radical Determinism and the Natural History of the Medium; Chapter 2 Spirits in Mind: Madness, Idiocy and the Cultural Capital of Ignorance; Chapter 3 Eugenic Summerlands: Sexual Reproduction and Family Engineering in the Spheres; Chapter 4 Blended Souls: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Occult Miscegenation; Chapter 5 Criminal Man and Recidivist Spirit: Spiritualism, Criminal Anthropology and Thanato-Rehabilitationism.

Chapter 6 Dead Letters: Bioaesthetics and the New Realism in Fin-de-Siècle SpiritualismConclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought. Studying transatlantic spiritualist literature from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, Christine Ferguson focuses on its incorporation and dissemination of bio-determinist and eugenic thought. She asks why ideas about rational reproduction, hereditary determinism and race improvement became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists and biographers in this period. She also examines how these concerns drove emerging Spiritualist understandings of disability, intelligence, crime, concep.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

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