In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James by Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, and: Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain by J. Jeffrey Franklin
  • Gauri Viswanathan (bio)
The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James, by Zoë Lehmann Imfeld; pp. x + 188. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, $109.99, £79.99.
Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain, by J. Jeffrey Franklin; pp. xvii + 264. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018, $49.95.

Although J. Jeffrey Franklin's Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain and Zoë Lehmann Imfeld's The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James both examine occultism's reach and influence in the nineteenth century, the two books could not be more different from one another in substance and style, signaling an unwieldy conceptual field that ranges from supernaturalism and the fantastic at one level to theological notions of immanence and transcendence at another. Pairing these two books accentuates the divergence in studies of spiritualism, for although the works being reviewed may have been published within two years of each other, their differing approaches to the spirit world suggest a methodological and philosophical eclecticism capable of delivering generative readings. Notwithstanding their disparate approaches, the two books stir up questions about occultism's shifting meanings over time and whether the horror genre to which occultism is typically relegated obscures attention to the religious context in which those meanings are forged.

Imfeld's book is the more analytically focused of the two in that it identifies the indeterminate space between ghostly haunting and Christology as a site of the creation of new theological understandings. Her innovative book brings the Victorian [End Page 542] ghost story into the frame of theological thought, delinking the ghost tale from the fantastic and realigning it with the search for transcendence of self. Imfeld builds on the notion of the uncanny (without quite naming it as such) in her exploration of the in-between space between the familiar and the foreign as a clearing ground for the instantiation of transcendence. While her reading of the unfamiliar as a source of dread follows a recognizable approach to supernatural affect, she maneuvers a clever turn in calling attention to the "semantic readjustment" that follows upon our encounters with the unfamiliar. We learn to develop a "hospitable response" to truth claims that are at variance with our secular commitments, and within that indeterminate space we begin to engage with what we previously understood to be archaic religious worldviews (19). The so-called archaisms are part of what Imfeld terms the "teleological meta-narrative" of theology, affirming rather than negating a theological worldview (19). Drawing on John Milbank's work to frame her argument about porosity and the bounded secular self, Imfeld notes that the unfamiliar induces either suspicion, which fortifies walls around the secular self, or conversation, through which the porous self develops new forms of consciousness. The challenge that the unfamiliar poses to our epistemological understandings unexpectedly confers a sense of freedom from the text—including the texts privileged by secular culture—at the moment that we are alienated.

Imfeld's key insight lies in delineating the in-between space as a catalyst for enabling theological readings that coexist with the secular. The book's readings of the ghost stories of authors from Sheridan Le Fanu to M. R. James flesh out this argument to show how theology permeates literature via the genre's conventions. The theorization of the ghost tale as a metanarrative of Christology will likely startle readers of this book, but Imfeld works through her material patiently to arrive at this counterintuitive understanding. Christology is far from being at odds with the emergence of new forms of spiritual consciousness. In fact, its affirmation comes about through a consciousness triggered by encounters with the unfamiliar. Imfeld's argument implicitly undermines the classification of emerging spiritual movements as alternative religions, or offshoot departures from mainstream religion motivated in part by the latter's insufficiencies. Imfeld instead proposes a framework that views...

pdf

Share