{"title":"Christine Ferguson","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"occult-imagination-in-britain-1875-1947-book-christine-ferguson-9780367885069","title":"The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947","description":"Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult schema and supernatural phenomena such as astral travel, ritual magic, and reincarnationism. Reflecting the signal array of responses by authors, artists, actors, impresarios and popular entertainers to questions of esoteric spirituality and belief, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the enormous interest in the occult during a time typically associated with the rise of secularization and scientific innovation. The contributors describe how the occult realm functions as a turbulent conceptual and affective space, shifting between poles of faith and doubt, the sacrosanct and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the forensic and the fetishistic. Here, occultism emerges as a practice and epistemology that decisively shapes the literary enterprises of writers such as Dion Fortune and Arthur Machen, artists such as Pamela Colman Smith, and revivalists such as Rolf Gardiner","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697625534737,"sku":"NGR9780367885069","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001731449105,"sku":"NIN9780367885069","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52533008105745,"sku":"NLS9780367885069","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0367885069.jpg?v=1750845212"},{"product_id":"language-science-and-popular-fiction-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle-book-christine-ferguson-9780754650829","title":"Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle","description":"Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-si cle. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51219721421073,"sku":"NIN9780754650829","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52522437607697,"sku":"NLS9780754650829","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0754650820.jpg?v=1750881634"},{"product_id":"open-secrets-book-christine-ferguson-9780197651599","title":"Open Secrets","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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51629314834705,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51629315522833,"sku":"NGR9780197651599","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52692671070481,"sku":"NIN9780197651599","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0197651593.jpg?v=1765619998"},{"product_id":"occult-imagination-in-britain-1875-1947-book-christine-ferguson-9781472486981","title":"The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947","description":"Between 1875 and 1947, a period bookended, respectively, by the founding of the Theosophical Society and the death of notorious occultist celebrity Aleister Crowley, Britain experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of engagement with unusual occult schema and supernatural phenomena such as astral travel, ritual magic, and reincarnationism. Reflecting the signal array of responses by authors, artists, actors, impresarios and popular entertainers to questions of esoteric spirituality and belief, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the enormous interest in the occult during a time typically associated with the rise of secularization and scientific innovation. The contributors describe how the occult realm functions as a turbulent conceptual and affective space, shifting between poles of faith and doubt, the sacrosanct and the profane, the endemic and the exotic, the forensic and the fetishistic. Here, occultism emerges as a practice and epistemology that decisively shapes the literary enterprises of writers such as Dion Fortune and Arthur Machen, artists such as Pamela Colman Smith, and revivalists such as Rolf Gardiner","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52615394787601,"sku":"NLS9781472486981","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53036530336017,"sku":"NIN9781472486981","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781472486981.jpg?v=1761523931"},{"product_id":"language-science-and-popular-fiction-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle-book-christine-ferguson-9781138262805","title":"Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle","description":"Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-si cle. 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She asks why ideas about rational reproduction, hereditary determinism and race improvement became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists and biographers in this period. She also examines how these concerns drove emerging Spiritualist understandings of disability, intelligence, crime, conception, the afterlife and aesthetic production. The book draws on rare material, including articles and serialized fiction from Spiritualist periodicals such as Light, The Two Worlds and The Medium and Daybreak as well as on Spiritualist healing, parentage and sex manuals.Key Features: *The first major study of Transatlantic Spiritualism's sustained commitment to eugenics, bio-determinism and hard hereditarianism *Devotes a chapter to eugenic and raciological writing of Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African-American Rosicrucian and sex magician whose work has only recently been rediscovered by scholars * Interdisciplinary and historicist methodology * The rich transatlantic reading demonstrates the continuity and influence between British and American Spiritualist writings on the body, reproduction and mental fitness","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53133843595537,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53133846151441,"sku":"NGR9781399567268","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781399567268.jpg?v=1778838810"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-christine-ferguson.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}