Аннотация:More than two decades after the late professor of English Jenny Franchot observed that American literary scholars had relegated religion to an invisible domain, studies of religion and literature are ascendant. One (perhaps unintended) result can be found in secularity studies. Inspired by the philosophers Charles Taylor and Bruno Latour and the anthropologist Talal Asad, the field defines the secular not as the absence or denial of religion but as a set of prescriptions that affect a range of human behaviors. In this context, the literary scholar Emily Ogden takes up mesmerism, “a new set of procedures for regulating enchantment” (p. 7, emphasis in original). Mesmerism was introduced in late eighteenth-century France by the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer; those who practiced it claimed to be able to manipulate the magnetic fluid present throughout the cosmos, including in the human body, to predict distant events, to diagnose disease, or even to control factory workers and slaves. It attracted interest for less than thirty years in the United States after 1836 but drew a disproportionate amount of attention in lecture halls and in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The growing popularity of spiritualism, or the conjuring of the spirits of the dead, assured mesmerism's demise by the 1850s.
