The Tragedy of the Korosko and The Fires of Fate
Douglas Kerr (ed.)
£125.00
The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle
The Land of Mist and Other Spiritualist Writings
£125.00
About this book
Presents the first scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s important spiritualist novel, The Land of Mist, accompanied by selected short works of his spiritualist non-fiction
- Features a lost chapter from the original manuscript that is here published for the first time
- A critical introduction and detailed annotations that explain the novel’s spiritualist theology and identify the real-life experiences, sites and figures on which the novel is based
- An essay on the text which explains the novel’s composition and publication
- A textual apparatus that collates The Land of Mist’s manuscript, original serialization in The Strand Magazine and first U.K. book edition
This book reunites Arthur Conan Doyle’s remarkable 1926 psychic novel The Land of Mist, with the erotically charged, religiously provocative and previously unpublished chapter, ‘The Darker Side’, after over a century of separation. The book includes an introduction, a textual essay, critical apparatus, explanatory notes and thirty-one illustrations by F.E. Hiley from the work’s original serialisation in the Strand. It represents Conan Doyle’s most sustained and earnest fictional exploration of the spiritualist movement to which he dedicated the last years of his life. Here the author repurposes the famous protagonist of his popular Professor Challenger series for spiritualist ends, hoping that the bellicose scientist’s dramatic conversion to afterlife belief would inspire a similar effect among its readers.
Reviews
This is an important moment in the history of the publication of Arthur Conan Doyle. Christine Ferguson’s landmark edition of The Land of Mist finally allows us to understand this much-misunderstood novel for what it really is: Conan Doyle’s most personal novel, the one in which his deeply-held Spiritualist views get their fullest fictional exploration. Far from being, as is often thought, an anomaly or an outlier in his work, Ferguson reclaims The Land of Mist as perhaps the key book for understanding the later Conan Doyle. For the first time, we get to read The Land of Mist in the context in which it belongs, surrounded by Conan Doyle’s other Spiritualist writings. Ferguson’s meticulously edited, brilliantly annotated edition of The Land of Mist changes the way we look at Conan Doyle’s later life and work.
Table of contents
General Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Chronology of the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
The Land of Mist: Introduction
The Land of Mist
Chapter I. In Which Our Special Commissioners Make a Start
Chapter 2. Which Describes an Evening in Strange Company
Chapter 3. In Which Professor Challenger Gives His Opinion
Chapter 4. Which Describes Some Strange Doings in Hammersmith
Chapter 5. Where Our Commissioners Have a Remarkable Experience
Chapter 6. In Which the Reader is Shown the Habits of a Notorious Criminal
Chapter 7. In Which the Notorious Criminal Gets What the British Law Considers to be his Deserts
Chapter 8. In Which Three Investigators Come Across a Dark Soul
Chapter 9. Which Introduces Some Very Physical Phenomena
Chapter 10. De Profundis
Chapter 11. Where Silas Linden Comes Into His Own
Chapter 12. There are Heights and There are Depths
Chapter 13. In Which Professor Challenger Goes Forth to Battle
Chapter 14. In Which Professor Challenger Meets a Strange Colleague
Chapter 15. In Which Traps are Laid for a Great Quarry
Chapter 16. In Which Challenger Has the Experience of his Lifetime
Chapter 17. Where the Mists Clear Away
Land of Mist Notes
An Essay on the Text
Other Spiritualist Writings: Appendices
I. ‘A New Revelation: Spiritualism and Religion’ (1916)
II. ‘The Vital Message: A Plea for the Reform of Christianity’ (1917)
III. ‘Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event’ (1920)
IV. ‘The Darker Side’ (c. 1924–25)
V. Letter from Elsie Wright to Geoffrey Crawley (1983)
Apparatus
A Note on Illustrations
Explanatory Notes
About the author
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