This dissertation attempts to explain how nineteenth-century American Spiritualist literature may have made readers feel like they were hearing voices, touching the dead, seeing celestial spaces, or enjoying other sensory proofs of the afterlife. Spiritualists believed that, while all human beings possessed faculties designed to perceive the dead,…

Two children, Dan and Una, sit in the woods and listen to a story of Britain's early history told to them by Sir Richard, a spirit conjured from the past for this instructive purpose. In this tale, Sir Richard gains treasure by defeating the "devils" that terrorize a village of African people. In many ways, this framed narrative sets up…

The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in Paris was a time of social upheaval that witnessed the appearance of a new style of Sapphic novel in Paris, that of women writing about their lesbian experiences. Although men had written prolifically on the subject during the previous decades, it was not until 1900…