Lindsay V. Reckson's Realist Ecstasy focuses its analysis on a number of interpretive sites, among them tropes of religious excess, secularism, performance, racially inflected cultural hauntings, literature, photography, capital punishment, and ethnography. Central in creating a dialogue across these multifarious elements is the study's focus on moments of religious ecstasy and, through them, an accounting of feeling as broadcast by the body, specifically the racialized body. These performative acts reinforce figurations of cultural and ideological difference through both identity and action and as portrayed via the era's dominant representational mode of realism. “Rather than break from realism's secular imaginary,” Reckson writes, “we must understand ecstasy as utterly central to it—and to the frenzied bodily semiotics of Jim Crow with which it was closely aligned,” as the study forges alignments among religion and depictions of racialized bodies that have persisted in American culture since the antebellum period (234). One of the study's central concerns is the way in which secular culture (which Reckson associates with realist literary and photographic practices) stages scenes of bodies engaged in religious excess. These performative moments, the text suggests, depict both the otherness of the racialized body and, in tandem, the perceived strangeness of religious transport.

Chapters in the study range across literary and photographic texts and result in readings of fictions by Stephen Crane, W. D. Howells, and Nella Larsen, along with a visual archive that includes spirit photography, images of the “Ghost Dance” ceremony, and photos of an execution at Sing Sing via electric chair. Such images are arranged so as to trouble the idea that religious practices were perceived as assimilated or relatable; rather, the portrait of religion here is of a hyperbolic practice containing the excesses of Methodism, tent revivals, and fervent oratory. Reckson's readings of bodies in the act of transport underscore the strangeness at the heart of literary and photographic representations of ecstasy while highlighting the radical and racialized disciplining of the non-white body, which is key to the book's interpretative axis. The study's chapters focus on “the economy of lynching” (69) in Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, which Reckson traces to antebellum minstrel performances, the Crane family's Methodism, and religious revivals, all of which yield a series of embodied relations. A chapter on the Ghost Dance takes up “‘Indianness’ as an index of religious, racial, and temporal difference” via the lens of the ethnographer who captured the ritual and who produced spiritualist photography, subjecting both to what Reckson terms “racial regulation” (103). At the center of the study is chapter 4, “Touching a Button,” which ranges across the harnessing of electricity for capital punishment to the push-button technologies of an emergent modernity, a mechanism incorporated into the electric chair's design. This section of the text seeks to map the “uneven shock and pleasure of electrified contact as it emerges under the body politic of Jim Crow,” revealing the interconnections of technological advancement and racial regulation (159). Electricity, Reckson contends, merges the literal and figurative, as the chapter connects photographs of the electric chair at Sing Sing with “the possibilities of electrified collectivity” via “racial terror” in Charles Weldon Johnsons Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a novel that invokes the religious vernacular of the New Negro movement (160). A reading of Helga Crane's ecstatic feeling in Larsen's novel, Quicksand, alongside the novel's representation of sexual and religious performances, closes the study. These materials constitute broad-ranging accounts of physical otherness and personal revelation, and they coalesce to portray ecstasy as an act that underscores the role of bodies engaged in unusual and, consequently, rigorously mapped practices.

Because of Reckson's focus on renderings of the out-of-body, “beside” the body experiences of ecstasy, which “animate and unsettle realism's drive to order bodily and affective experiences,” the study's engagement with theories of realist representational practices, say through a discussion of verisimilitude, is relatively light—or, less central than its deep engagement with theories of race and performance (12). The study's operative understanding of realism is of a secular, hegemonic idiom invested in the effects it creates, namely, of “racial regulation,” an understanding rooted in the body's circulation as a legible sign, for Reckson presents realism as deeply motivated by the visible. The greatest critical interventions, thus, are with race theory, particularly the treatment of the racialized body, and methodologies of othering during the 1880s through the 1920s. Realism, as invoked throughout the study, serves as a means of characterizing the dominant practices of an era and, with it, a set of observations about the era's representational politics. The project's deep historicizing of racial representations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, alongside its interpretation of performative moments of religious ecstasy haunted by the “affective life of Jim Crow,” constitute its greatest strengths (5). In all, Reckson's interrogation of the interweaving of race relations, performance, and religious feeling offers up a compelling and important contribution to American literary and visual studies.