The Invention of Telepathy [Hardcover]

The belief in telepathy is still widely held and yet it remains much disputed by scientists. Roger Luckhurst explores the origins of the term in the late nineteenth century. Telepathy mixed physical and mental sciences, new technologies and old superstitions, and it fascinated many famous people in the late Victorian era: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Huxley, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. This is an exciting and accessible study, written for general readers as much as scholars and students.

Introduction
1. Terrains of Emergence, 1870-1882
2. Coining Telepathy: Concept and Elaboration, 1882-1901
3. Making Connections: W. T. Stead's Occult Economies
4. Telepathic Doxai: Knowledge and Belief at the Imperial Margin
5. Psychical Research and the Late-Victorian Gothic
6. The Woman-Sensitive: Nerves, New Women and Henry James
7. Afterlives, 1901-34
Index

Luckhurst has created a nuanced, generous, and compelling argument which places telepathy at the heart of modernity. -Leigh Wilson,Nineteenth-Century Contexts

The Invention of Telepathycomes at the disturbing story of modern psychic experiments through rich, overlapping layers of social and intellectual history and makes comprehensible what otherwise seem eccentricities and even folly on the part of scientists and thinkers. --Marina Warner,TimesLiterary Supplement(Books of the Year)

This fine cultural history traces the rise of telepathy, from its emergence at the occult origins of psychology in 1882 to its adoption by the academy as a key paradigm of late-Victorian culture. --Times Literary Supplement

Luckhurst's book is an extremely valuable cultural, literary and scientific history of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. His understanding of the periodical culture of thefin de si?cleis impressive.... A fine, balanced account of the complexities surrounlÃ"