Invisible hosts : performing the nineteenth-century spirit medium's autobiography / Elizabeth Schleber Lowry.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Modern American Spiritualism; Models of Womanhood; Four Mediums' Autobiographies; Approach; Chapter One Something in a Stranger's Experience: Evangelical and Spiritualist Women's Autobiography; American Spiritual Autobiography: Race and Gender; Women's Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century; Women Speaking in Public; The Afterlife; Structure, Style, and Spiritualism; Conclusion; Chapter Two Intoxicating Notoriety: Why Mediums Couldn't Quite Be ""True"" Women; Fraudulence and Purity; Institutional Authority and Piety; Conclusion.

Chapter Three The Great Master Medium: Spiritualism, Casuistry, and Christian DiscourseContext: Christianity Meets Spiritualism; Resistance and Casuistry; Demoralization; Remoralizing; New, True, and Practical; Conclusion; Chapter Four Home Sweet Home: Constructions of Domesticity, Embodiment, and the Public Sphere; Context: Reconceptualizing Public and Private; Poisoned Bouquets and Imperiled Virtue; Model Homes: The Performance of Domesticity; Haunted Houses; The Hall Lampstand; Death Foretold; The Mother Country; Mothering; Conclusion.

Chapter Five Pure Intentions and Filthy Lucre: Relationality and the Rhetorical Implications of Endorsement and PatronageContext: Rubes and Dupes; Statements and Testimonials; The "Death-Blow" of 1888; Beyond the Death-Blow; Endorsements and Cultural Capital; Britten and "Respectable People"; Payment and Purity; Character Witnesses; Conclusion; Chapter Six Deep Trance: Corporeality, Dualism, and Submission; Context: "At Bottom One"; Mental and Physical Mediumship; Representing and Resisting Dualism: Maynard and Jones; "A Quiet Dreamy Feeling"; Jones and the Doctors.

The Horrors of Feminine CorporealityBondage; Agency and Consciousness; Conclusion; Chapter Seven Indecorous Indecorum: Prophetic Women, Travel Writing, and the Politics of Virtue; Context: Genre and Travel Writing; From Panorama to Deep Focus: Britten and Jones as Travel Writers; Britten; Jones; An American Legacy of Violence; Incendiary Doctrines; "We Shall Conquer"; Exigency and Activism; Social Justice; Conclusion; Conclusion Autobiographical Ends; Breaching Boundaries and Performing Femininity; Difference and Defiance; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on September 06, 2017).

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