Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Abstract

It is an ambitious book that attempts to draw connections between the Pueblo Revolt (1680), the Salem witch trials (1692), and Harriet Jacobs, and that is precisely what John J. Kucich attempts in his history of spiritualism. Kucich takes an unusually broad approach, identifying as spiritualism not merely the historically specific movement known as Modern Spiritualism (associated with the Fox sisters, Kate, Margaretta, and Leah) but also a broader system of beliefs predicated on an ongoing communication between mortals and the spiritual world. In an admirable attempt to trace the long influence of such ideas, Kucich offers novel readings of Jacobs's autobiography, mid-nineteenth-century American magazines, and the novels of Mark Twain, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Charles W. Chesnutt, arguing that spiritualism played a significant role in mediating material conflicts within and between cultures and that such struggles were “imbricated within a wider field of literary and cultural production” (p. xiii).