Reviews
"Victorian studies once ignored the bizarre and eccentric world of mesmerists, spiritualists, and psychical researchers. But over the last twenty years, a new generation of cultural critics has explored how scientific, technological, and spiritual experiments were complexly intertwined in the nineteenth century. Jill Galvan¡¯s book is another contribution to this exciting and burgeoning field. In a series of deft readings, she examines how Victorians often overlaid the figure of the woman as sympathetic social mediator, technological operator, automatic typewriter, and mediumistic detecting device, sensitive to messages from the dead. Galvan convincingly explains how important this relay of occult and mechanical analogies saturated a culture living through continuous technological revolution. Combining gender studies with the history of science and technology and literary criticism, this is the kind of cultural history that sparks with light and energy."?Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London
"Any literary scholar or cultural historian of the Victorian period will learn a great deal from Jill Galvan¡¯s analysis of linked trends in telecommunications technology, labor history, Victorian literature, and the occult. By focusing on gender, Galvan has exposed key cultural connections between writing, narrating, typing, and ¡¯communicating with the dead.¡¯ Galvan shows how different telegraphs, telephones, phonographs, and typewriters look in the context of Victorian occultism and the female medium. Galvan¡¯s book offers practical, grounded criticism driven by a genuine interest in women¡¯s history."?Laura Otis, Emory University
"In The Sympathetic Medium Jill Galvan mines Victorian and modern texts of the wired and occult to argue compellingly for the importance of the understudied figure at the center of them all. The female telegraph sounders, secretaries, spirit channelers, and go-betweens of both familiar and lesser known late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary works receive their due in this fascinating book, which makes important contributions not only to Victorian literary studies but also to scholarship on the cultural impact of communications technologies. Galvan breaks new interdisciplinary ground in compelling readers to recognize media studies as a kind of gender studies."?John Picker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"In the late nineteenth century, women came to seem both the ideal spirit mediums and the perfect operators for newly invented media such as the typewriter and telephone. The Sympathetic Medium persuasively demonstrates how the idea of a feminine capacity for simultaneous automatism and sympathy links the s?ance to the switchboard, occult experience to office culture, and literary fiction to popular narrative. In Galvan?s lively account, gender ideologies and psychic channeling emerge as crucial relays in the history of modern communication."?Richard Menke, University of Georgia, author of *Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems*