684 research outputs found
Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics
No full textThis is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790–1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing was prescient. Best known today for her collection of “real” ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: Or Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works covered the Newgate genre, helped to
initiate detective fiction, included elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and pointed the way to the Sensation novels of the 1860s.
Politically radical in many ways, Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights.
This volume aims to restore an author who was once famous and lauded to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature
The Night Side of Nature
No full textThe novelist and children's author Catherine Crowe (c.1800–1876) published The Night Side of Nature in two volumes in 1848. This lively collection of ghostly sketches and anecdotes was a Victorian best-seller and Crowe's most popular work. Sixteen editions appeared in six years, and it was translated into several European languages. The stories are intertwined with Crowe's own interpretations and commentaries which attack the scepticism of enlightenment thought and orthodox religion. Crowe seeks instead to encourage and re-invigorate a sense of wonder and mystery in life by emphasising the supernatural. Volume 2 probes the mysterious phenomena of troubled spirits, haunted houses, spectral lights, apparitions and poltergeists. Crowe's vivid tales, written with great energy and imagination, are classic examples of nineteenth-century spiritualist writing and strongly influenced other authors, including Charles Baudelaire, as well as providing inspiration for later adherents of ghost-seeing and psychic culture.
</jats:p
The Night Side of Nature
No full textThe novelist and children's author Catherine Crowe (c.1800–1876) published The Night Side of Nature in two volumes in 1848. This lively collection of ghostly sketches and anecdotes was a Victorian best-seller and Crowe's most popular work. Sixteen editions appeared in six years, and it was translated into several European languages. The stories are intertwined with Crowe's own interpretations and commentaries which attack the scepticism of enlightenment thought and orthodox religion. Crowe seeks instead to encourage and re-invigorate a sense of wonder and mystery in life by emphasising the supernatural. The stories in Volume 1 centre on dreams, psychic presentiments, traces, wraiths, doppelgängers, apparitions, and imaginings of the after-life. Crowe's vivid tales, written with great energy and imagination, are classic examples of nineteenth-century spiritualist writing and strongly influenced other authors as well as providing inspiration for later adherents of ghost-seeing and psychic culture.</jats:p
Speaking of Seeing Ghosts: Visions of the Supernatural in the Tales of Catherine Crowe
No full textThis chapter looks at concepts of vision and the ghost stories of Catherine Crowe
Catherine Crowe: The freethinking nineteenth-century "medium" of science, fiction, and reform
No full textCatherine Crowe was a nineteenth-century British woman writing bestselling sensational fiction featuring amateur female detectives at the same moment as Edgar Allan Poe. However, her contributions to the establishment of detective fiction and other genres and movements has, until recent decades, been largely forgotten. This dissertation uses actor-network theory to investigate facets of Crowe’s unconventional life, career, influences, and legacy which have hitherto been obscured due to archival limitations and the attempts of several powerful journal editors to silence her public promotion of unorthodox egalitarian beliefs about women and science. Specifically, this study seeks to help restore Crowe to the historical record in the following ways. Chapter one explores some early influences whose intellectual and practical support helped launch her career and shape the ideas about women’s intellectual and economic independence she espouses in her fiction. Chapter two considers the ways Crowe and another woman in her science-minded reformist network, Harriet Martineau, sought to use their fiction as learning technologies to bring scientific instruction to readers otherwise excluded from scientific education. Chapter three explores Crowe’s role in fanning the flames of the British Spiritualist and American abolition movements and the ways she was punished by Charles Dickens, John Elliotson, and other men with scientific investments and literary connections for promoting her egalitarian scientific beliefs. Chapter four revises the persistent misconception that Crowe’s career effectively ended in 1854 and explores the ways her network aided her in returning to publishing: this final chapter considers the ways she responded to her detractors and continued boldly espousing her freethinking scientific beliefs in several late-career works which, I argue, are some of her most important. Ultimately, this study seeks to demonstrate the role Catherine Crowe played within her network to help shape several important nineteenth-century literary, reform, and scientific movements
‘The Natural and the Super-Natural: Ghost dogs, Science and Sustainability in the Writings of Catherine Crowe’
No full textThis paper resurrects the prominent mid-Victorian Spiritualist Catherine Crowe, as an important and radical ecological writer. Ahead of all other Spiritualist writers, Crowe posited the naturalness of the super-natural and called on science to investigate. Crowe advocated a new kind of scientific investigation that was not just rational or objective, but which included experience and intuition. In her most famous book The Night Side of Nature (1848), Crowe gathered people’s experiences of the ghostly and one of the things she documented was the phenomenon of ghost dogs and canine ghost hunters. An egalitarian, Crowe saw the non-human as a vital part of the environment and she looked towards a more sustainable way of the living and the dead, humans and animals to exist with each other. She denounced the idea that man is superior to animals saying: ‘there is a deep mystery in the being of these creatures, which proud man never seeks to unravel’ (1859: 9). For Crowe, dogs are the most intuitive, the most aware species and the spirits of the ghost dogs in her stories display love and loyalty from beyond the grave pointing to a relationship between nature, super-nature, humans and animals that is productive, emotional and symbiotic.
This paper explores the interconnections posed by Crowe between the natural and the supernatural, between science and intuition (the masculine and the feminine), and between the human and the non-human. Although largely forgotten today, I argue that Crowe initiated some of most important environmental questions of the C19th
Responding to Literature Through Student–Author Interviews: Eighth-Grade Students Challenge Chris Crowe’s Mississippi Trial, 1955
No full textThis study explores virtual, student–author interviews eighth-grade students led with Chris Crowe in response to his young adult novel Mississippi Trial, 1955. The opportunity to interview the author motivated students to read the novel. Through their text-world development, students connected with the fictional and nonfictional characters, Hiram Hillburn and Emmett Till, respectively. Through their critical reader-responses, students sought truth about Emmett Till’s case as they questioned Crowe about the choices he made as an author and researcher, which supported students’ understanding of character development and historical significance of Emmett Till’s case. Crowe’s answers to the students’ critical questions were not easy, but through the student–author interview preparation and implementation process, participants captured a shared understanding of Emmett Till’s case and how its connection to the U.S. civil rights movement impacted history and is pertinent today. Ultimately, this article advocates for reader-response pedagogy to include virtual or in-person student–author interviews
Testimony and Narrative on the Supernatural in the Work of Catherine Crowe, the London Dialectical Society and Edward William Cox
No full textThis thesis is an exploration of the role of testimony and the production of narrative in supernatural research in the mid to late Victorian period (1848-1879). It focuses on the work of Catherine Crowe and Edward William Cox as two examples of amateur researchers into a discipline dismissed by a rising materialist physiology that had cemented its institutional authority, largely dismissing objective validity of supernatural occurrences. It also examines the role of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society’s work on Spiritualism as a remarkable example of a new method of investigating Spiritualist phenomena. Crowe as specialist in writing and Cox as a legal expert, sought to use their specialisms of expertise in human behaviour to argue for the experiential validity of supernatural phenomena. This was done by adopting a scientific model but also by a defense of testimony as a reliable form of evidence, especially when put in an accumulative narrative of many similar testimonies. A large part of the thesis is taken with non-fiction with the exception of Crowe where realist methods of investigation and supernatural narratives are incorporated into her fictional work. This is done to show Crowe’s method of portraying veridical supernatural phenomena as part of a realist narrative. The 19th century also witnessed the rise of societies and increasingly specialized disciplines of knowledge. This thesis will chart the concurrent rise of this amongst the aforementioned as a unique example of non-spiritualist or skeptic researchers seeking a new method through language and methods. From Crowe one saw the domestic researcher, the Committee showed the rise of a group of researchers and finally with the Psychological Society, an actual society devoted to exploring the phenomena outside of Spiritualist and skeptic discourses. It is a study of testimony as data and how that data became narrative and information
A transpersonal model of music therapy: Deepening practice (Crowe)
No full textThis is a review of the book "A transpersonal model of music therapy: Deepening practice" authored by Barbara Crowe.
Title: A transpersonal model of music therapy: Deepening practice Author: Barbara Crowe Publication year: 2017 Publisher: Barcelona Publishers Pages: 218 ISBN: 978194541126
Interactive effects of losing key grazers and ecosystem engineers vary with environmental context
No full textLoss of biodiversity may cause significant changes to ecosystem structure and functioning. Evidence from long-term in situ removal experiments is rare but important in determining the effects of biodiversity loss against a background of environmental variation. Limpets and mussels are thought to be important in controlling community structure on wave-exposed shores in the UK: limpets as key grazers, mussels as ecosystem engineers. A long-term factorial removal experiment revealed interactive effects that varied between 2 shores in SW England. At one site (Harlyn), removing limpets caused a significant shift in community structure, but where limpets were lost, the presence or absence of mussels made little difference. Where limpets were present, however, the removal of mussels changed the structure and variability of the community. At the other site (Polzeath), the loss of mussels caused significant changes in community structure, and limpets played a less important role. At Harlyn, fucoid algae were abundant throughout the year. There were fewer algae at Polzeath, and cover was dominated by the summer bloom of ephemerals. At Harlyn, the limpets played a major role in controlling algae, but their effects were mediated by the presence of mussels. Other grazers were not able to fulfil their role. At Polzeath, mussels were far more important, and ephemeral algae grew on them regardless of the presence or loss of limpets. These findings emphasise the need to assess spatial and temporal variation in the effects of biodiversity loss and the importance of interactive effects of loss of multiple species from different functional groups
- …
