Download or read book Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition written by Leon Surette and published by National Poetry Foundation. This book was released on 1996 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criticism. This collection of essays is posited on the conviction that mythical, ecstatic and revelatory topoi in the modernist works of Yeats, Eliot, Williams, H.D., Pound, Joyce, et al, are motivated not by a sceptical and positivistic dismissal of the religious past -- as implausibly maintained by the New Criticism -- but rather these features arise out of a radical and reformist attempt to revive ancient pagan religious sensibilities. In essence, the modern occult amounts to a neo-pagan piety that is polytheistic, fleshly, erotic and ecstatic -- opposed to a Christian or Jewish piety that's monotheistic, otherworldly, ascetic and revealed. In short, the occult manifests itself in modernist literature in what Nietzsche would have called a Dionysian guise -- confused because of its rejection of Judeo-Christian sensibilities with a sceptical secularism. Among the dozen contributors here are Peter Liebregts, John Coggrave, Barry Ahearn, Leonora Woodman, M. Anthony Trembly and Archie Henderson.
Download or read book The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature written by Allan Kilner-Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probing 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 century-the era of cocktails, motorcars, bobbed hair, and war-are 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 Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and Aleister Crowley were tied to occult beliefs, and this book sets these leading figures alongside less well-remembered but equally splendid modernists including Paul Brunton, Mary Butts, Alexandra David-Neel, Florence Farr, Dion Fortune, Hermann Hesse, and Rudolf Steiner. From the little magazines where occultism and Fabianism were comfortable companions, to consulting rooms of psychoanalysts where archetypes were revealed to be both mystical and mundane, to the forbidden mountain trails that led to formidable spiritual teachers, the conditions of modernism were invariably those conditions which inspired a return to the occult traditions that many thinkers believed had long evaporated. Indeed, in many ways these traditions were the making of the modern world. By uncovering hidden hopes and anxieties that faced a newly modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how literary modernists understood occultism as a universal form of cultural expression which has inspired creative exuberance since the dawn of civilisation.
Download or read book The Birth of Modernism written by Leon Surette and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1994 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette challenges our traditional understanding of modernism by situating the origins of modernist aesthetics in the occult.
Download or read book The Occult in Modernist Art Literature and Cinema written by Tessel M. Bauduin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many modernist and avant-garde artists and authors were fascinated by the occult movements of their day. This volume explores how Occultism came to shape modernist art, literature, and film. Individual chapters examine the presence and role of Occultism in the work of such modernist luminaries as Rainer Maria Rilke, August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, Joséphin Péladan and the artist Jan Švankmaier, as well as in avant-garde film, post-war Greek Surrealism, and Scandinavian Retrogardism. Combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of Esotericism Studies with those of Literary Studies, Art History, and Cinema Studies, this volume provides in-depth and nuanced perspectives upon the relationship between Occultism and Modernism in the Western arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Download or read book Modernism and Magic written by Leigh Wilson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the interplay between modernist experiment and occult discourses in the early twentieth century
Download or read book The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature written by Allan Kilner-Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probing 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 century-the era of cocktails, motorcars, bobbed hair, and war-are 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 Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and Aleister Crowley were tied to occult beliefs, and this book sets these leading figures alongside less well-remembered but equally splendid modernists including Paul Brunton, Mary Butts, Alexandra David-Neel, Florence Farr, Dion Fortune, Hermann Hesse, and Rudolf Steiner. From the little magazines where occultism and Fabianism were comfortable companions, to consulting rooms of psychoanalysts where archetypes were revealed to be both mystical and mundane, to the forbidden mountain trails that led to formidable spiritual teachers, the conditions of modernism were invariably those conditions which inspired a return to the occult traditions that many thinkers believed had long evaporated. Indeed, in many ways these traditions were the making of the modern world. By uncovering hidden hopes and anxieties that faced a newly modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how literary modernists understood occultism as a universal form of cultural expression which has inspired creative exuberance since the dawn of civilisation.
Download or read book Literature and Occult Tradition written by Denis Saurat and published by Ardent Media. This book was released on 1966 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Saurat's book gives us a common background of tradition for the works of such diverse poets as Milton, Blake, Shelley, Emerson & Whitman; Goethe, Heine, Wagner, & Nietzsche; Hugo, Vigny, Lamartine & Leconte de Lisle. A final chapter is devoted to a study of the philosophical ideas of Spenser's poetry.
Download or read book Modernism and the Occult written by John Bramble and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of modernism's high imperial, occult-exotic affiliations presents many well-known figures from the period 1880-1960 in a new light. Modernism and the Occult traces the history of modernist engagement with 'irregular', heterodox and imported knowledge.
Download or read book From Thaumaturgy to Dramaturgy written by Sørina Higgins and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1890 and 1945, at least nine British and Irish dramatists—including W. B. Yeats, Charles Williams, and Aleister Crowley—were initiated into occult secret societies; yet scholarship has failed to acknowledge the importance of alternative spiritualities in modernist literature. This dissertation contributes a more complex, nuanced, and realistic understanding of modernism, especially drama, complicating received metanarratives about one-way cultural evolution towards secularization and literary “progress” favoring Ibsenesque and Shavian realism. Many modern plays enact the imagination’s magical power to create reality, but this truth has been erased from literary history due to selectivity bias towards texts featuring fragmentation, alienation, and nihilistic despair. Far from hiding away as atavistic reactionaries, occult playwrights posed the same questions as their avant-garde peers, presenting systems of symbolism designed to offer meaning-making strategies in the face of contemporary conditions. I provide three case-studies in support of my contentions that magic was modern, occult dramas were mainstream, and religion is essential to literary study. First is Yeats, the Hermetist, who smuggled magic into secular contexts. His Countess Cathleen and Words Upon the Window-Pane stage Golden Dawn ritual, enact his doctrine of the Daimon, and invoke audience members’ divine selves. Second is Williams, a Christian, whose Masques of Amen House, Judgement at Chelmsford, and Terror of Light snuck occultism into ecclesiastic contexts, but ultimately rejected initiatory Gnosticism. Finally, Crowley the Satanist performed spirit-summonings publicly in Rites of Eleusis. Each adapted esoteric tradition to their times, then invented new religions and innovative dramaturgical techniques for enlightening audiences. In a distinctively modernist move, each of thesewriters individualized the occult, creating new thaumaturgical systems and developing dramaturgical techniques and contexts through which to disseminate their nouveaux theologies. Given their genre-defying public performances of magic, I offer the first speech-act reading of theatrical language that takes into account the perlocutionary force of all drama, arguing that enchantments retain their illocutionary power when spoken on stage.
Download or read book Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture written by Miriam Wallraven and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.
Download or read book Rub n Dar o and the Romantic Search for Unity written by Cathy L. Jrade and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism was the major Spanish American literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leader of that influential movement was Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan now recognized as one of the most important Hispanic poets of all time. Like the Romantics in England and the Symbolists on the Continent, Darío and other Modernists were strongly influenced by occultist thought. But, as the poet Octavio Paz has written, "academic criticism has ... preferred to close its eyes to the stream of occultism that runs throughout Darío's work. This silence damages our comprehension of his poetry." Cathy Login Jrade's groundbreaking study corrects this critical oversight. Her work clearly demonstrates that esoteric tradition is central to Modernism and that an understanding of this centrality clarifies both the nature of the movement and its relationship to earlier European literature. After placing Modernism in a broad historical and literary perspective, Jrade examines the impact of esoteric beliefs upon Darío's view of the world and the role of poetry in it. Through detailed and insightful analyses of key poems, she explores the poet's quest for solutions to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief. The movement that Ruben Darío headed brought Hispanic poetry into the mainstream of the "modern tradition," with its sense of fragmentation and alienation and its hope for integration and reconciliation with nature. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity enriches our understanding of that movement and the work of its leading poet.
Download or read book Modernists and the Theatre written by James Moran and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernists and the Theatre is the first study to examine how theories of modernism intersect with those of the theatre within the works, philosophies and literary lives of six key modernist writers. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archive material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran reveals how these literary figures interacted with the theatre through playwriting, by engaging in philosophical debates and participating in theatrical performances. Chapters assess W.B. Yeats's very earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the interconnections between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, Eliot's thinking about theatre in Dublin, and the feminist politics of Virginia Woolf's small-scale theatrical experiments. While these writers valued coterie production and often made hostile comments about drama, this volume highlights the paradoxical fact that, despite their harsh words, the theatrically 'large-scale' also attracted each of these writers. The theatre event of 'restricted production' offered modernists a satisfying mode of sharing their work amongst the like-minded, and the book discloses a set of unfamiliar events of this sort that allowed these writers to act as agents of legitimation in granting cultural value. The book explores their engagements with popular drama, as well as the long-forgotten acting performances in which each of these writers personally participated. Moran uncovers how the playhouse became a key geographical space where the high-modernists could explore a tension that fascinated them, and which motivated much of their wider thinking and literary work.
Download or read book Modernist Alchemy written by Timothy Materer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist Alchemy takes a close look at the work of twentieth-century poets whose use of the occult constitutes a recovery of discarded beliefs and modes of thought: Yeats and Plath try to dismiss conventional religion, Hughes captures a sense of adventure, H.D. seeks to liberate repressed concepts, while Duncan and Merrill hunt for a lost understanding of sexual identity which will allow for androgyny and homosexuality.
Download or read book Modernist Writings and Religio scientific Discourse written by L. Vetter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses the early twentieth-century intersection of scientific and religious discourse exploring literary modernism through the lens of cultural history, focusing on the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. It covers a range of topics such as electromagnetism and sexuality, dance, and theories of spiritual evolution.
Download or read book J M Synge written by Seán Hewitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a complete re-assessment of the works of J.M. Synge, one of Ireland's major playwrights. The book offers the first complete consideration of all of Synge's major plays and prose works in nearly 30 years, drawing on extensive archival research to offer innovative new readings. Much work has been done in recent years to uncover Synge's modernity and to emphasise his political consciousness. This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works. Tracing his journey from an early Romanticism through to the more combative modernism of his later work, the book's innovative methodology treats text as process, and considers Synge's reading materials, his drafts, letters, diaries, and journalism, turning up exciting and unexpected revelations. Thus, Synge's engagement with occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, and even a late reaction against eugenic nationalisms, are all brought into the critical discussion. Breaking new ground in ascertaining the tenets of Synge's spirituality, and his aesthetic and political idealization of harmony with nature, the book also builds on new work in modernist studies, arguing that Synge can be understood as a leftist modernist, exhibiting many of the key concerns of early modernism, but routing them through a socialist politics. Thus, this book is valuable not only to considerations of Synge and the Irish Revival, but also to modernist studies more broadly.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Modernism written by Vincent Sherry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 1579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.
Download or read book Mechanical Occult written by Alan Ramón Clinton and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technology and spirituality formed uncanny alliances in countless manifestations of automatism. From Victorian mediums to the psychiatrists who studied them, from the Fordist assembly line to the Hollywood studios that adopted its practices, from Surrealism on the left to Futurism and Vorticism on the right, the unpredictable paths of automatic practice and ideology present a means by which to explore both the utopian and dystopian possibilities of technological and cultural innovation. Focusing on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, Alan Ramon Clinton argues that, given the wide-reaching influence of automatism, as much can be learned from these writers' means of production as from their finished products. At a time when criticism has grown polarized between political and aesthetic approaches to high modernism, this book provocatively develops its own automatic procedures to explore the works of these writers as fields rich in potential choices, some more spectral than others.
