Open Secrets : The Popular Fiction of Britain's Occult Revival, 1842-1936

Open Secrets sheds new light on the fascinating popular fiction produced by key writers within Britain''s occult revival, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Emma Hardinge Britten, Marie Corelli, Mabel Collins, Arthur Machen, Charles Fort, Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune. In their hands, genres aimed at mass readerships- the Bildungsroman, romance, tabloid tit-bit, and detective tale- became potent tools through which to imagine and test unorthodox ideas about the unseen world. Their remarkable literary experiments aligned the rhythms of popular genre fiction with those of spiritual seekership, insisting that occultism could and should be for the mass reading public.

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.