Light on the path : advancing occultism through esoteric fiction, 1880-1940 /
"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and America experienced an occult revival, a flourishing "occulture" that signaled the increasing presence of the occult in the popular imagination. This period also witnessed another major cultural development--a rapid ex...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
2025.
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| Series: | Oxford studies in Western esotericism.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and America experienced an occult revival, a flourishing "occulture" that signaled the increasing presence of the occult in the popular imagination. This period also witnessed another major cultural development--a rapid expansion of print culture that offered a dizzying array of new magazines, pulp fiction, cheap single volume and even paperback novels, and emerging forms of genre fiction, all designed to meet (and create) the demands of a growing fiction readership. Light on the Path explores the surprising interdependence of these two phenomena. As supernatural fiction moved in increasingly occult directions, modern occultism itself became so entangled with popular fiction that it might be understood as a literary phenomenon. This was not coincidental. This book recounts the strategic efforts by modern occultists, including Mabel Collins, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Kenneth Morris, and Talbot Mundy, to use popular fiction to wrest esotericism away from its traditional modes of secrecy and make esoteric experiences of self-transformation widely accessible"-- Provided by publisher. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197773260 0197773265 9780197773277 0197773273 |