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• 1 2016-11-23T12:34:42-05:00 The Dark Seance 3 plain 2016-12-16T21:03:12-05:00 John Lawson’s “The Dark Séance” (published in The Era Almanack in 1906) is a wonderful short comic piece. Lawson attends a séance and when discovering that the medium has not yet arrived, tries to impersonate the medium and utterly fails to persuade the audience of this identity. This piece is included partly for its novelty (most comic treatments of the séance did not follow this plot) and also because it illustrates how criticism of the séance was significantly devoted to mocking the interpretive abilities of the public at large. Many critics in this section thus reveal a deep anxiety over the epistemological practices of society at large, explaining (through their debunking of mediums) what chaos these shaky practices can lead to.