Open Secrets
The Popular Fiction of Britain's Occult Revival, 1842-1936
Published on 4. June 2025
248 pages
978-0-19-765160-5 (ISBN)
Description
Open Secrets examines the popular genre fiction produced by leading figures within Britain's occult revival from the 1840s to the 1930s, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Emma Hardinge Britten, Marie Corelli, Mabel Collins, Arthur Machen, Charles Fort, Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune. Ferguson demonstrates how the revival's popular fictional output was always more than just a reflection of, or mode of propaganda for, unorthodox authorial belief or initiatory intention-this fascinating corpus became a charged site for genre innovation and formal experimentation.
The rich spiritual and literary affordances of revival fiction, Open Secrets reveals, were deeply interlinked and mutually transformative. As embraced by occult revivalists, popular literary genres such as the Bildungsroman, the romance, the new journalistic article, and the detective tale forged narrative routes into the unseen world, ones that alternately championed, tested, and challenged the esoteric philosophies and paranormal theories that inspired them.
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approx. 08/2028
Oxford University Press Inc
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06/2025
OUP India
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Person
Christine Ferguson is Chair in English Studies at the University of Stirling, where she teaches and researches in the fields of Victorian literature, Gothic Studies, and esotericism studies.
Content
1. Introduction: In Bulwer's Bookshop
2: Magical Meisters: The Problem of Progress in the Occult Bildungsroman
3: Sex, Self, and Liberation in the Female Reincarnation Novel
4: Journoccultism: Numinous News and the Mantic Fragment
5: Occult Detection in the Aeon of Horus
Conclusion: Forming Occult Fiction in the Secular Age
Bibliography
Index
