This wide-ranging book explores the many factors that contributed to the rise in the interest in hallucination and visionary experience in writing during the 19th century and beyond. The work discusses how, even before the vogue for psychical research and spiritualism began to influence writers at the end of the 19th century, tales of horror, the supernatural, ghosts, and demons had been haunted by the possibility of some grand deception by the senses. Is then shows how hallucination took on a new force and significance not just in ghost stories and horror fiction, but in other forms of writing and how authors began to encourage their readers to assess whether the ghostly had its origins in some supernatural phenomenon from beyond the grave, or from some deception within our own minds. Through a series of close and often unusual readings of numerous writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, and Arthur Machen, this original study explores what happened when hallucination appeared in fiction, and—even more importantly—why it happened at all.

Product Description: T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was the author of a small number of poems and some genuinely innovative critical and philosophical writings. From this modest output his influence on later writers was considerable: T. S. Eliot described his poems as 'beautiful' and Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis were both inspired by his work...read more

Product Description: Well this is it: the end, last gasp, final straw; in short, the concluding dark volume in a series of books some idiot called ‘critical inventions.’ Let us be like wry Oscar Wilde, said the idiot, and dream of the critic as artist, or at least as someone else, as someone other than who we had thought he was, or been taught he was...read more