Alchemy in contemporary fiction: Old texts, new psychologies. Issue 1 (1st January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hart, Carina
• Is Part Of: Critique. Volume 60:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 86
• Page End: 97
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Subjects: Alchemy -- contemporary fiction -- postmodernism; Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Letterkunde; Engels; Electronic journals; 809.304
• DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2018.1470081
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0011-1619

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The 1980s and 1990s saw a revival of alchemy in popular culture and literary fiction—an incongruous pre-modern visitor to millennial debates around postmodernity as critique of Enlightenment modernity. Novels by Umberto Eco, Hilary Mantel, Peter Ackroyd, Lindsay Clarke, and Patrick Harpur reinterpret alchemy in psychological terms, following Jung, to facilitate narratives of self-transformation, often as Habermasian communicative action. The novels foreground the affinity between alchemy and postmodernism as intertextual, palimpsestic narrative traditions, suggesting that the pre-modern was never really left behind. The revival of alchemy in contemporary fiction therefore questions the accepted genealogies of modernity and postmodernity.