ABSTRACT
The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing explores how writers and mental scientists of the fin de sicle were facing a new kind of Gothicism in which they were radically conflicted between a desire to police the boundaries of science, identity, and writing itself and, conversely, to experience the ecstasy of engaging with the supernatural. The book has treated haunted scenes of writing as crucial to an understanding of authorship, identity, interactions with new technologies, the science of mind, and spiritualism at the fin de sicle, which in turn raises questions about the fascination at the end of the century with resurrecting ghosts. Henry James conjured up the ghost of a pen on his death-bed and spirits were called from the grave by their relatives so that they could appear in photographs. Mesmerism revived all the occult associations in hypnotism, and Vernon Lee revived and exorcised ghosts in her aesthetic writings.
