Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain

A study of the representation of the occult in late-Victorian popular fiction, exploring different perceptions of authorship and creativity.

Andrew McCann (Author)

9781107064423, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 July 2014

210 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.45 kg

With the increasing commercialization of publishing at the end of the nineteenth century, the polarization of serious literature and popular fiction became a commonplace of literary criticism. Andrew McCann cautions against this opposition by arguing that popular fiction's engagement with heterodox conceptions of authorship and creativity complicates its status as mere distraction or entertainment. Popular writers such as George Du Maurier, Marie Corelli, Rosa Praed and Arthur Machen drew upon a contemporary fascination with occult practices to construct texts that had an intensely ambiguous relationship to the proprietary notions of authorship that were so central to commercial publishing. Through trance-induced or automatic writing, dream states, dual personality and the retrieval of past lives channeled through mediums, they imagined forms of authorship that reinvested popular texts with claims to aesthetic and political value that cut against the homogenizing pressures of an emerging culture industry.

Introduction: popular fiction as media histrionics
1. Property, professionalism and the pathologies of literature: Walter Besant and the discourse of authorship circa 1890
2. Dreaming true: aesthetic experience, psychiatric power and the paranormal in George Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson
3. Marie Corelli and the spirit of the market
4. Writing aestheticism through colonial eyes: Rosa Praed and the theosophical novel
5. Arthur Machen and the 'Differentia of Literature'
Conclusion: the popular fiction of critical theory
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Occult studies [HRQX], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]