This wide-ranging book explores the many factors that contributed to the rise in the interest in hallucination and visionary experience in writing during the 19th century and beyond. The work discusses how, even before the vogue for psychical research and spiritualism began to influence writers at the end of the 19th century, tales of horror, the supernatural, ghosts, and demons had been haunted by the possibility of some grand deception by the senses. It then shows how hallucination took on a new force and significance not just in ghost stories and horror fiction but in other forms of...