Description
Book SynopsisProbing the relationship between modernist literary experimentation and several key strands of occult practice which emerged in Europe from roughly 1894 to 1944, this book sets the work of leading modernist writers alongside lesser known female writers and writers in languages other than English to more fully portray the aesthetic and philosophical connections between modernism and the occult. Although the early decades of the twentieth centurythe era of cocktails, motorcars, bobbed hair, and warare often described as a period of newness and innovation, many writers of the time found inspiration and visionary brilliance by turning to the mysterious occult past. This book's principle intervention is to reimagine the contours and boundaries of literary modernism by welcoming into the conversation a number of significant female writers and writers in languages other than English who are often still relegated to the fringes of modernist studies. Well-remembered poets and novelists such as
Trade ReviewAllan Kilner-Johnson demonstrates with emphatic assurance how myriad spiritual seekers, too often overlooked in existing surveys of aesthetic modernism – for example, Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, Mary Butts and Florence Farr – were crafting new writing modes by excavating imaginatively the ancient recondite past. * Andrew Radford, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, University of Glasgow, UK *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Divine Reading 2: The Return to Ritual 3: The Modernist Shadow 4: The Making of an Overman 5: The Other East Bibliography
