1st Edition

Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches

By Miriam Wallraven Copyright 2015
248 Pages
by Routledge

248 Pages
by Routledge

248 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

1. Introduction: "Occultophobia" and Gender Blindness in Cultural and Literary Studies 2. The Discursive Strategies and Functions of Occult and Gendered Worlds in Literature 3. "A mere instrument" or "proud as Lucifer"? Self-Presentations in the Occult Autobiographies of Emma Hardinge Britten (1900), Annie Besant (1893), and Alice A. Bailey (1951) 4. "She was a witch by vocation": The Emancipatory Strategies of Occult Transgression in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes (1926) 5. "She became a priestess": Occult Liminality, Psychoanalysis, and the Role of the Text in Dion Fortune's The Sea Priestess (1938) 6. Unreliable Occultism: Narrating the Occult 7. Occult Worlds: Utopias and Dystopias of Magical Power 8. Outlook: "Standing before me she is familiar": Deciphering Esoteric Connections and Feminine Occult Power in Rose Flint's Poetry 9. The Functions of Occult and Spiritual Literature

Biography

Miriam Wallraven is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She is the author of A Writing Halfway between Theory and Fiction: Mediating Feminism from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (2007) and many articles on gender and cultural studies, spirituality and literature, and travel literature.