Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture) - Softcover

Wilson, Leigh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0748627707 ISBN 13: 9780748627707

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2015

Synopsis

While modernism's engagement with the occult has been approached by critics as the result of a loss of faith in representation, an attempt to draw on science as the primary discourse of modernity, or as a hidden history of ideas, Leigh Wilson argues that these discourses have at their heart a magical practice which remakes the relationship between world and representation. As Wilson demonstrates, the courses of the occult are based on a magical mimesis which transforms the nature of the copy, from inert to vital, from dead to alive, from static to animated, from powerless to powerful.

Wilson explores the aesthetic and political implications of this relationship in the work of those writers, artists and filmmakers who were most self-consciously experimental, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Dziga Vertov and Sergei M. Eisenstein.

About this title

About the Author:

Leigh Wilson is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster. She publishes on modernism and contemporary British fiction.

Review:

In this provocative and engaging book, Leigh Wilson finds magic at the heart of modernism. Looking afresh at its fascination with the occult, she suggests that modernist writers and filmmakers drew on magical thinking in their experimental art to create works that radically transformed the world they knew.
Professor Helen Carr, Goldsmiths, University of London

This is a major contribution not only to our understanding of modernism's fascination with the supernatural, but of modernism's fundamental investment in modern magic. It breaks new ground by considering magic's importance for filmmakers and artists, novelists and poets. It is the most important book on the topic in over a decade.
Dr Stephen Ross, University of Victoria

Wilson's text provides an excellent rereading of modernism in the context of magic. It offers the reader wonderful background on a number of modernist authors and filmmakers.
Erin Hollis, California State University - James Joyce Quarterly, 50.4

[A] valuable contribution towards a deeper understanding of the interrelatedness of occult discourses and those of modernist art.
- Tessel M. Bauduin, Cultural History

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0748627707
• ISBN 13: 9780748627707
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224