Speaking with the Dead: Resurrective Reading and Pneumatological Imagination in George MacDonald

abstract: This essay examines George MacDonald's representation of reading as a conversation with the dead. It argues that MacDonald's notion of resurrective reading is both a subversion of Spiritualist discourse, and an invitation to practice an attentive mode of reading that, while critically engaged, remains open to the unfamiliar and unpredictable. By analyzing MacDonald's model of resurrective reading with particular reference to Phantastes (1858), David Elginbrod (1863), and Donal Grant (1883), this essay reveals the spiritual potential that Victorians like MacDonald associated with the act of reading. It thus demonstrates how attending to the nuances of theology in twenty-first-century readings of Victorian literature provides a fuller understanding of the period's reading practices.