Chapter 4 considers the project of worldmaking and the concept of personality from the perspective of two prose genres that dominated Yeats’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s: autobiography and occult philosophy. My justification for bringing these genres together lies in an understanding of how they are used in his exploration of personality and aesthetic Bildung. The logic of misrecognition can be discerned not only in Yeats’s growing understanding of the self/anti-self dichotomy but also in the the process by which he learns, at the hands of sometimes deceptive instructors, the secrets of the spirit world. Yeats’s spiritual journey in A Vision frames a cosmic system in which personality, understood as a dialectics of self and anti-self, defines many of the historical figures who exemplify the phases of the moon. In Autobiographies, he becomes increasingly aware of the need to document his own personality with the rectifying aim of discovering the “age-long memoried self” that coexists with his ordinary “daily self” (Au 216). Each text creates in its own fashion the contours and atmosphere of a world in which the past – on the one hand, through recollection; on the other, through an understanding of the historical gyres – retains its vitality and presentness.

Until the late twentieth century, literary scholars often assumed that Victorian scientific advances challenged the dominance of religion, theorizing that religious institutions and beliefs decline with modernity. More recently, scholars affiliated with the “religious turn” in Victorian studies have suggested Christian denominations gradually embraced scientific ideas, with new religious movements such as Spiritualism and Theosophy enabling Victorians to preserve elements of Christianity (e.g., belief in an afterlife) in a rapidly changing world. This chapter intervenes in these debates using two very different novels as case studies: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), both of which freely mix Christianity with science: Wilde blends Catholicism, neuroscience, and aestheticism, while Corelli creatively revises scientific theories to align with her heterodox faith. With their occult and pseudoscientific leanings these works ask us to reconsider what counted as religion or science and to redraw the boundaries of faith to encompass unorthodox trends.

The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.

In September 1968, regular British Vogue columnist Polly Devlin returned from a year working for the magazine’s sister publication in New York, and published a long article commenting on how, in her absence, the mood had changed.

When Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) translated the ancient Corpus Hermeticum in 1460 and unlocked the secrets of the mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus, he discovered a wellspring of knowledge that promised to transform humanity’s understanding of both the world and its Creator. He and many others believed that the writings of Hermes conveyed the prisca sapientia, or ancient wisdom, once vouchsafed to Adam in the Garden but then lost after humanity’s fall from divine grace. The philosophical tradition known as hermeticism quickly spread across Renaissance Europe, alongside renewed interest in the mystical Judaic practice of the Kabbalah, another source of wisdom that sought to reveal the hidden traces of God in the universe. These traditions of learned magic inspired the archetypal Renaissance magus, the English philosopher John Dee (1527-608), in his quest for knowledge. He conversed with angels and advised some of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, but like the fictional figure of Faustus, who dabbled in dark arts and damned himself for eternity, Dee had to contend with the distrust and fear of contemporaries who believed that magic was the work of demons.

This chapter explores the role and function of occult forces in South Asian bazaars. Drawing mainly, but not exclusively, on material from eastern South Asia, it challenges the repeated attempts by scholars to read these forces along functionalist lines. Instead, it demonstrates that there is a substantial body of formalized textual knowledge which theorizes the nature, role, and application of these forces. This knowledge is available, in the bazaar itself, in a specialized genre of printed books. The chapter argues against mapping the knowledge produced in these books within the category of “religion,” since the emphasis on belief and bounded identities that have become germane to modern ideas of “religion” are inapplicable to the practices of the occult bazaar. The occult bazaar, it is argued, should be treated as a distinctive sphere of abstraction that is separate from, though interacting with, the more formalized and well-known abstraction of “the economy.”

Poetry in the nineteenth century is often described as ‘haunted’; that is, as being replete with spectres and poignantly aware of its literary predecessors. From their readings of early Gothic fiction, the poets of the period learned both to celebrate and to mourn the past, an approach that is evident across a wide range of texts. Close reading demonstrates not only how the aesthetics but also the underlying anxieties of the Gothic permeate Victorian poetry, transforming Gothic into an acutely contemporary mode. To read Victorian poetry as Gothic offers a point of entry into the darker anxieties of the age, represented in miniature with splinters of Gothic anxiety. This chapter focuses on the ways in which poets such as Thomas Hood, James Thomson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mary Coleridge appropriate Gothic aesthetics to reflect a nineteenth-century unease with social change, faith and death, looking backwards to the Gothic past and forwards to an uncertain future.

The introduction sets out the historiographical framework and principle approaches of the book.Studies of nineteenth and twentieth century interactions between the established sciences and psychical phenomena have yielded many important insights but left many questions unanswered.We know a good deal about the psychical interests and investigations of a handful of scientists but only a partial sense of how far their examples were followed.We know a lot about the ‘occult’ uses to which spiritualists, theosophists and other occultists put developments in physical sciences relating to ether, energy, electricity and matter, but far less about the uses to which scientists made of psychical and occult phenomena in their scientific enquiries.Existing studies have also established much about the connections between ’physics and psychics’ at the level of ideas, theories and concepts, but have largely sidestepped the experimental nature of these connections.

This chapter argues that a logic of fiduciary exchangeability finds its most sustained and versatile expressions in the work of the celebrated London writer Iain Sinclair. Sinclair’s work of the 1990s is both a crucial signal of a deepening intimacy between experimental and genre writing that has become all the more pronounced over the past two decades, and a leading-edge example of the techniques of market metafiction so prevalent today. The chapter reads Sinclair’s novel Downriver (1991), published in the wake of the Thatcherite transformation of the City of London’s financial services sector, as exploring what happens to structures of fiduciary circulation when they are pushed to – and beyond – their limits. The reading of the ostensibly non-fictional Lights Out for the Territory (1997) as an exercise in the “hermeneutics of speculation,” meanwhile, argues for the constitutive roles of faith and belief even in texts that apparently ground themselves in the real and material, in the process challenging the homology between literary realism and precious metal that is a basic premise of much key work in the New Economic Criticism.

This chapter argues that we might better understand postmodernism’s ambivalent appropriation of genre models by theorizing it in terms of a logic of quasi- or “as if” belief that cuts across structures of financial and literary market exchange. Taking recent work in economic sociology and the “New Economic Criticism,” as jumping-off points it shows how a deep-rooted kinship between fiction and finance as forms of writing that mediate value in the modern credit economy (in Mary Poovey’s terms) are becoming newly visible today. The shared condition of fictional texts’ and financial and monetary instruments’ successful market circulation is their solicitation of tacit faith or trust in imaginary things. A desire both to exploit and to subvert this condition of “fiduciary exchangeability” shapes the experiments in supernatural narrative form offered by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Lunar Park (2005), Anne Billson’s Suckers (1993), Stephen Marche’s The Hunger of the Wolf (2015), and Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010). In the work of these writers we see many of the crucial elements of market metafiction in action.