Between Method and Madness: Essays on Swedenborg and Literature - Softcover

Between Method and Madness: Essays on Swedenborg and Literature addresses the question of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) influence on literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection opens with a seminal essay by William Butler Yeats, a lyrical and critical masterpiece in which the Nobel Prize-winning poet reveals his breadth of lifelong philosophical and theosophical interests, framing them around the significant influence of Swedenborg. The collection also studies Swedenborg’s role in the birth and rise of the Symbolist movement and his influence upon Victorian poetry. The volume closes with an essay by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who views Swedenborg as a founding figure for the Spiritualist circles he himself advocated. This volume, the fourth in the Journal of the Swedenborg Society series, contains the following six essays:

• W. B. Yeats, “Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places”
• Gary Lachman, “The Spiritual Detective: How Baudelaire invented Symbolism, by way of Swedenborg, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe”
• Adelheid Kegler, “Elements of Swedenborgian Thought in Symbolist Landscapes: with reference to Sheridan Le Fanu and George MacDonald”
• Richard Lines, “Eros and the Unknown Victorian: Coventry Patmore and Swedenborg”
• Gary Lachman, “Space: the Final Frontier. O. V. de Lubicz Milosz and Swedenborg”
• Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Story of Swedenborg”

Also included are a preface by Stephen McNeilly, a chronology of Swedenborg, biographies of the essay subjects, and an index.