Curiously placed between the realms of science and supernaturalism, the phenomenon of the uncanny double has a distinctive presence in both. Another kind of duality is at issue in the imagined presence of the doppelgänger, as a figure in both physical and mental life. While the phenomenon of the Brocken spectre is one of the era’s most resonant manifestations of an uncanny mirroring of the...
The pursuit of poetry and the new science of the mind were inseparable strands of the seminal work of the late nineteenth-century poet, psychological and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers. An early passion for classical prosody translated in later life into a complex, nuanced poetry devoted to the performative externalization of intense psychological experiences of various kinds. Myers...
This essay explores the relationship between aesthetics and psychology through the idea of the museum as a ‘dream space’ in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It begins with a discussion of Charles Dickens’s Amy Dorrit and Hilda in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, two women who, like Dorothea Brooke, dream their way around Italian museums and the fragment-rich spaces of Rome. Pregnant moments of...