Browse Hierarchy ESH6096: Enchantment and Enquiry in Modern(ish) Writing 1900-60

Modernist literature has often been assumed to be thoroughly disenchanted in character. But as this overlooks the close relationship of magical, supernatural and spiritual discourses with scientific and rational enquiry in the first half of the twentieth century. This module explores writers who blur the boundaries between 'official' and 'heterodox' knowledges and disciplines and, in so doing, interrogate and contest liberal, technological, environmental, nationalist and colonialist narratives of progress. Ranging over diverse works and genres including ghost stories, modern-day fables and folk-tales, speculative fiction, experimental literature and autobiography, this module explores how and and why modern texts imagine the re-enchantment of the world.