Andrew McCann challenges us to rethink the role of the occult in late Victorian popular British fiction. Through a series of compellingly argued and well-researched case studies focusing on the work of four popular writers who shared an “unironic investment in occult or paranormal experience” (3)—George Du Maurier, Marie Corelli, Rosa Praed, and Arthur Machen—McCann suggests an alternative literary history of texts that are typically assimilated into accounts of a fin-de-siècle flourishing of Gothic fictions. Unlike some of their famous contemporaries (such as Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle), du Maurier, Corelli, Praed, and Machen wrote against the grain of the escapist conventions of popular romance with a credulous conviction that defied their commercial orientation. Taking this distinction as his point of departure, McCann contends that at a moment when the commercialization of literary culture was “consolidating a rationalized conception of the author as a possessive individual, a producer of property and rational subject of contractual negotiation,” the work of du Maurier, Corelli, Praed, and Machen constitutes “a kind of discursive alterity” that is both “inherent in the emerging culture industry” and resistant to its instrumentalizing impulses (3). Writing about the marginal, the colonial, the patriarchal, and of liminal psychological states—dreaming, telepathic communication, and paranormal manifestations—these writers typify a definitive tension for McCann between instrumentality and alterity that he argues intersects with an emergent popular literary aesthetics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As this line of argument indicates, McCann is not interested in rehearsing familiar oppositions between the popular fiction of this period and the beginnings of an experimental modernist avant-garde. This study, by contrast, offers a timely and much-needed alternative to these conventional delimitations of the literary that reconsiders these writers' mutual interest in what Machen dubbed the “differentia of literature” in The Hill of Dreams—that is, great literature's inherent distinction from forms of commerce or “communicative pragmatism” (4). For Machen this distinction was not grounded in style or didacticism but in a claim for a form of inspired communication or spiritual mediation that transcended or eluded the proprietorial notions of authorship generated by the literary marketplace. As Corelli observed in A Romance of Two Worlds, “As far as the arts go, it is a bad sign of poet, painter or musician, who is arrogant enough to call his work his own. It was never his and never will be. It is planned by a higher intelligence than his, only he happened to be the hired laborer chosen to carry out the conception.”

While acknowledging the seminal work of Lisa Gitelman, Pamela Thurschwell, Laura Otis, Richard Menke, Roger Luckhurst, Jill Glavan and others, McCann traces an alternative path through the complex history of convergences between the technological and the paranormal. Pressing beyond the analysis of texts that engage with the new media of the period, or that construct themselves as “outputs” of extended communicative systems or networks of inscription (176), McCann's study explores why, at precisely the moment when literature's claim to distinction came under its greatest pressure, writers such as Corelli, Machen, Praed, and du Maurier reimagined themselves and their work as alternative or idiosyncratic variations of precisely the new media formations that supposedly signaled literature's demise. As McCann lucidly puts it, these writers variously assert “a mimetic relationship to their own conditions of possibility, not simply as commodities, or as works of entertainment, but as outputs of the forms of discursive heterodoxy implicit in fin de siècle media broadly conceived” (20).

One of the strengths of this study is the balance it strikes between a rigorous theorization of this liminal and transformative period of literary history and focused analysis of the particular ways in which specific writers simultaneously engaged with and diverged from the prevailing and entangled discourses of literary professionalism and authorship of the 1890s. In the first chapter McCann maps this cultural field through an analysis of the formative role Walter Besant and the “Society of Authors” played in the alignment of the commercialization of publishing and the proprietorial definition of authorship, a symbiosis that self-interestedly enshrined the polarization of the popular and the literary, the commercial and the aesthetic, through strategic appeals to “received notions of taste, discernment, rationality and education” (35). To suggest alternative forms of literary communication that disturbed the authority of the author was to lapse into unprofessional credulity. Yet, as McCann's subsequent case studies reveal, this is precisely what Corelli, Machen, Praed, and du Maurier did by insisting on forms of authorship that were deeply antithetical to self-mastery and rationalization.

McCann's subsequent readings of specific texts refine and nuance the theoretical and historical scope of this argument, with particularly fine readings of psychiatric power and the paranormal in George Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson, Corelli's spiritualist-inspired refusal of the market in A Romance of Two Worlds, and Arthur Machen's occultist conception of literary distinction in The Hill of Dreams, the latter nicely setting up McCann's more far reaching concluding reflections on the popular fictions of critical theory. Drawing together the multiple implications of this definitive chapter in popular literary history, McCann reinforces the continuities between the “discursive alterity” of fin-de-siècle popular fictions and the role of the occult in modernism—continuities that radically complicate our understanding of the history and politics high cultural forms by emphasizing the popular cultural influences that inspired them. It is fine-grained theoretical observations such as these that set this study apart, broadening its appeal to scholars of literary and cultural modernisms, as well as to researchers working in the cognate fields of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies.