ABSTRACT
The writing experiments performed by spiritualists and psychologists thus represent two contemporaneous methods of addressing the same anxiety concerning the loss of authorial autonomy and integrity following the rise of new writing machines in the nineteenth century. Unlike psychologists, however, spiritualists attempted to allay these anxieties by preserving the classical notion of authorship. The paradox of spiritualism, in other words, is that spiritualist séances revealed the degree to which literary texts could be produced without the conscious mediation of the writer while also preserving the author as a spectral trace or revenant, which appeared increasingly ephemeral and intangible.
