Posthumous: The American 'Spirit Novel'

Hannah Walser’s paper showcases wills of unexpected and uncanny strength. In 1873, an American printer named Thomas James published a continuation of Charles Dickens’s unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood: authored by the... [ view full abstract ]

Hannah Walser’s paper showcases wills of unexpected and uncanny strength. In 1873, an American printer named Thomas James published a continuation of Charles Dickens’s unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood: authored by the “spirit-pen” of the great British novelist, the text was presented as the product of Dickens’s will inhabiting James’s body. Nor was Dickens the only author working from beyond the grave around the turn of the twentieth century: “the ghost of O. Henry,” Mark Twain “at the Ouija board,” and even the spirit of the humorist Frank Stockton were credited with texts that came out after their deaths. Walser argues that this minor American tradition of “spirit-novels” offers a unique model of the survival of the will — one in which agency after death requires strategic self-objectification on the part of both the animating “spirit” and the transcribing “medium.” This structure made the spirit-novel a prescient representation of the transformations of authorship and literary prestige in the marketplace, figuring authorial will as constituted by a stylistic fingerprint.