Spirituality

This essay focuses on the proliferation of diverse spiritualities in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Theosophy, neopaganism, spiritualism, and emerging occult practices. It makes the case that this proliferation of spiritual thought emerged not in opposition to, but rather in harmony with, the ascendancy of scientific naturalist frameworks in the wake of Darwinism, and that the flexibility of “spirituality” as a concept serves a crucial function for understanding this late Victorian religious landscape. As a (very brief) case study, it examines the fusion of the spiritual and scientific in Marie Corelli's late Victorian bestseller, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Her work, I suggest, highlights the key role of new popular genres of speculative fiction in navigating the boundaries between spirit and matter at the fin de siècle.