Abstract
This essay will posit Mangan’s use of the supernatural as less an indication of escapism, than social instruction; an engagement with the live debates of the early nineteenth century between the logic of science, and the seemingly inexplicable feasts of a so far unaccountable spiritual domain. The publication of Mangan’s supernatural prose fiction of this period, as well as the latter’s active interest in the occult and Swedenborgian beliefs, coincides with several interrelated cultural movements of this period of which it is well worth taking note. Joyce claimed that it was in Mangan that ‘East and West meet’, and it is within the orientalism of the early nineteenth century that much of Mangan’s Eastern poetic translations are understood. At the same time, and clearly related to this oriental discourse, Mangan’s stories relate the beginnings of psychical research as a legitimate investigative and scientific discipline in Britain, which subtly drew on its affiliation with the psychology of the unconscious; a veritable and unexplored Other of both the mind and the visible world, which finds its literary representation in Mangan’s tales of an exoticized supernaturalism.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Essays on James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak |
Editors | Sinéad Sturgeon |
Place of Publication | U.K. |
Publisher | Palgrave |
Pages | 163-183 |
Number of pages | 21 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781137273376 |
Publication status | Published - 2014 |