Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams

Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-90-04-36903-0
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 24, 318 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 617 g

Reihe: Aries Book Series

Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams situates the life and fiction of the Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Aren Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic, kabbalah, alchemy and ritual experience in Williams’s seven novels of supernatural fantasy. From this specific analysis, he develops more broadly applicable approaches to the serious expression of religious experience in fiction. Roukema shows that esoteric knowledge has frequently been blurred into fiction because of its inherent narrativity and adaptability, particularly by authors already attracted to the syncretism, multivalence and lived fantasy of the modern occult experience.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roukema, Aren

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Alternative Glaubensformen Eklektizismus, Esoterik, Anthroposophie, Theosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Einzelne Autoren: Monographien & Biographien
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Alternative Glaubensformen Okkultismus und andere religiöse Praktiken

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Introduction: Through the Portal
Williams and the Occult: Some Discursive Complications
Encountering the Occult in Williams’s Fiction: A Literary/Historical Method

1 Life and Times: Christian Occultism in Modern England
A Life in Myth
“But about This Reality of Yours …”
The “Dead Master”
Arthur Edward Waite
Occult Imagination and the Secret Tradition
Constructing a Cordon Sanitaire
Christian Occultism

2 The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross: A Modern Occult Experience
Masonic Rosicrucianism
The Paths of the Tree of Life
The F.R.C. and the Golden Dawn: The Adeptus Minor Rituals

3 Fiction and Experience
The Unbearable Lightness of Fiction
Fantastic Narratology: The Liminality of Esoteric Knowledge
The Novels—Intrusions of the Supernatural
The Gothic Occult
In the Network of Occult Fiction
The Novels of an Adeptus Exaltatus
“The End of Desire”—The Discovery of the Higher Self
Occult Fiction, Occult Life

4 Kabbalah: Charles Williams and the Middle Pillar
A.E. Waite and Modern Occult Kabbalah
Becoming Shekinah: Charles Williams and the Middle Pillar
The Greater Trumps
Kabbalistic Eros and Romantic Theology

5 The High-Priestess: Charles Williams and Modern Magic
Magic in the West
The “High-Priestess of Heaven”
Ritual Semiotics and the Magical Imagination

6 A Magical Life in Fiction
Active Imagination
Active Will
The Way of P’o-lu
Art Magic: Sex, Poetry, Consciousness
Reanimation: Enchantment and Empowerment
Interpretive Drift: The Development of a Modern Christian Magic

7 The Transmutation of Charles Williams: Spiritual and Literary Alchemy
From Metallurgy to Particle Physics: A Brief History of Alchemy
Influences: Lee, Waite, Atwood
Rosicrucian Alchemy
The Great Work in Fiction
A Literary Alchemist

Epilogue: The Coagulation of Belief

Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Aren Roukema is a doctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. He is Co-Editor of Correspondences and has published on esotericism and fiction in The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 (Routledge, 2018), Journal of Inklings Studies, and North Wind.