In a new review in Review 31, Stuart Walton discusses Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media by Stefan Andriopoulos. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“It remains impossible to locate the origins of TV in one single domain of knowledge, and Andriopoulos argues that it wasn’t invented to serve a pre-existing need, but came about because of investigations into ways of amplifying ethereal, or (as they would come to be) electrical, signals from the beyond. Occultist researches were a principal driver of the technology. We might also wryly note that early verdicts on TV as a form of home entertainment stressed its balefully hypnotic nature, a cultural trope still wearing well today in condemnation of anybody who watches the kind of rubbish you wouldn’t be seen dead near, and which was the precise charge once levelled at the Gothic novelists.”