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An examination of the functions of intention in the making of art begins with the contrast between inspirationist and rationalist perspectives on artistic creativity. As an alternative, Livingston emphasizes the blending of spontaneous and deliberate, planned and unintentional moments in the creative process. Intentions are necessary to art-making and are linked to the assumption that a work of art is always evaluable in terms of one kind of potential artistic value—artistry or virtuosity. Intentions are linked to artists’ projects, to the distinction between complete and incomplete works of art, as well as to the several senses of ‘fragment’ in critical discourse.

This chapter examines the claim that the unity of consciousness is lost in the context of forms of hypnosis that involve a ‘hidden observer.’ According to a number of theorists—most notably Hilgard—some hypnotized subjects have two streams of consciousness at once: a ‘covert’ stream that is accessible only by way of ‘hidden observer’ probes, and an overt stream that is accessible in the normal ways. The evidence in favour of this ‘two‐streams’ model of the hidden observer is examined and found to be quite strong. However, an even more plausible account of the hidden observer holds that hidden observer subjects have a single stream of consciousness that switches back and forth between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ states. The hidden observer prompt changes the content of the patient's experience by directing his or her attention to stimuli that had previously been neglected.

The creative energy and radical technique evident in W. S. Graham's late unpublished poetry constitute a significant avant-garde challenge to the institution of literature, particularly the fixity and impersonality he associates with printed text. Graham has defaced Robert Shaplen's book Toward the Well-Being of Mankind with graffiti-like annotations and by pasting in prose manuscripts of his own. Based on the dates that Graham habitually wrote on the manuscripts, it is possible that they were written between 1967 and 1973. These prose manuscripts are, for the most part, experiments with automatic writing, a significant factor in the production of the late poetry. This chapter examines Graham's workbooks, which it considers works of art in their own right, and suggests a link between Graham and Surrealist art and between Graham and James Joyce. In particular, it looks at the previously unpublished material that Graham was working on in the late 1960s — the ‘clusters’ that produce much of the distinctive work published in his 1970s volumes.

This chapter presents two case studies which explore how in the years leading up to the Second World War Time and Tide’s seemingly non-feminist veneer is disrupted. First, the chapter discusses Time and Tide’s book reviews section and argues that the surface appearance of a less feminist engagement with literature and the arts is called into question by the archive of Theodora Bosanquet’s automatic writing. This unpublished material resituates her public reviews and – in the context of a perceived crisis in book reviewing – reveals a mode of feminism that Barbara Green has theorised as ‘a form of attention’ (2017) and evidences Bosanquet’s ambivalence about the male professionalisation of literary criticism. Second, the chapter shows how Time and Tide’s seemingly non-feminist veneer is disrupted much more overtly when all the leading feminists of the period emerge publicly in the paper at the outbreak of the Second World War. Through an analysis of Time and Tide’s correspondence columns the chapter explores the contribution this magazine made to public debates about war and peace, and its sustained commitment to the ordinary woman reader.

The aetiology of Schreber’s illness, begins with his attempt to stand for election to the Reichstag and his humiliating defeat. Viewed positively, he was seeking to escape his life as a lawyer and breaking out of the confines of legal science propelled him into an untenable position. He was admitted to the asylum because he was sick of law and this story is recounted in the Memoirs in terms of a struggle with the theistic source and model for the legal code. His is an atheistic critique of law, an impugning of the mystical source of norms in favour of a tellurian law and human legislation. The arcanaimperii or mysteries of rule are exposed as fictions, as the hallucinated projections of thoughtless bureaucrats.

This essay examines the role of Cesare Lombroso’s scientific and occult researches in shaping Yeats’s view of the mind, whether creative or criminal, in the mystical system of A Vision. Although the philosophical and aesthetic importance of Yeats’s mystical work has recently received serious attention, notably in W.B.Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts, the models used to recuperate and reassess this aspect of Yeats’s have not so far included minor contemporary figures like Lombroso, but have rather focused on classical, idealist, or political philosophy. Lombroso’s view of different human types, expressed most powerfully in his studies on genius and criminality, Criminal Man (1876) and The Man of Genius (1891), are important influences to consider for Yeats’s portrayal of representative psychological types in his typology of the phases of the Great Wheel. Beyond A Vision, Yeats’s reading of Lombroso connects with his interests in crime, eugenics, psychoanalysis, predestination, and the occult in his theater, for example, in his late play ‘Purgatory’, which is discussed in detail.

Ezra Pound was an important figure in W. B. Yeats’s imagination in the genesis, development, explication and dissemination of the system of A Vision. Beginning with the time that Yeats and his new wife, George, spent at Stone Cottage together (during which they began their automatic writing sessions), continuing through their travels in Italy and residence in Rapallo, and culminating in Pound’s role as the intended recipient of the “Packet” that opens the second version of A Vision, Ezra Pound’s presence is persistent. Drawing together many strands of Yeats’s and Pound’s literary and personal relationships (including Pound’s appearance in early drafts and versions of A Vision), as well as some examination of parallels between their work, this essay argues for the centrality of Pound to A Vision, further suggesting that A Vision and The Cantos are in conversation with one another, as different means of exploring modernism’s more esoteric aspects.

From the 1880s, W. T. Stead became increasingly interested in spiritualism and telepathy, believing paranormal communications provided proof of an afterlife and support for biblical accounts of angels, spirits, and miracles. Convinced that he possessed paranormal powers, he practiced automatic writing as a form of communication with the spirits of the dead. From 1893 to 1897, he edited the journal Borderland, aimed at promoting and popularizing occult studies. His Letters from Julia, first published in 1897 and claiming to be messages from the afterlife, became an international bestseller. For Stead, the Christian revival movement of 1904–5 was infused with elements of spiritualism and telepathy, and he was drawn to psychological views of religious experience. His ‘Julia’s Bureau’, formed in 1909, was meant to help individuals communicate with the spirits of the dead. While many were critical, Stead embraced spiritualism as supporting religious belief in an increasingly sceptical and secular era.

This final chapter consider the moment when hands run amok, that is, when the hand’s role as executive tool and as symbol of human agency goes awry. Tracing the history of the severed hand tale, the chapter suggests that stories about severed hands, and the film adaptations of those stories, proliferate in the modernist period. The chapter considers the reasons why the human hand is a creature of such fascination for modernist writers, as well as assessing the prompts for the conferral of that ‘creature’ status upon the hand. The chapter considers, in particular, Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1904), and Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac (1920). The latter is of particular interest since it describes a battle for control over a single pair of hands which is waged between a pianist and a surgeon, two figures which this study has considered to be men of ‘hand-made work’, to borrow a concept from Jacques Derrida. After considering, amongst other hand issues, legal mortmain and the practice of automatic writing, this chapter concludes Haptic Modernism by suggesting the reasons for modernist panic regarding hands-gone-rogue, and by offering a list of hand-associated figures that have structured this study as a whole.

Chapter 5 develops a discussion of the Wattses’ and the De Morgans’ writings in which they explore women-centred issues. Drawing on extensive archival research, this chapter studies various neglected writings – private and published – by the Wattses and the De Morgans. Exploring questions of authorship and authority, it analyses collaborative and individual writings that focus on and inscribe the female body: Evelyn’s unpublished juvenilia, William’s neglected novels, and their anonymously published automatic writing; George’s anti-corsetry article, Mary’s private experimentation with poetry, and her published guide to her symbolic decoration The Word in the Pattern. With the exception of William, who embarked on a second career as a novelist, these figures have never before been appraised as literary as well as artistic figures, and their writings are largely unexplored. The author analyses and compares the representation of women in their writings, showing how they explored women’s place, engaged with contentious early feminist debates, and supported or promoted women’s liberation in both their literary and visual works.

This essay inspects W. B. Yeats’s use of classical philosophy in A Vision, paying close attention to when and how Yeats turned to Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Plato, Empedocles, and Heraclitus in order to articulate the system that was handed to him via the automatic writing of his wife, George Yeats. Special attention is given to how the increased use of philosophy in the second edition of A Vision answers a variety of needs, including not only the providing of clarification and inspiration but also the legitimization of Yeats’s idiosyncratic system. Yeats’s use classical philosophy is also looked at in terms of what literary genres it brings into play, and how it relates to Victorian Hellenism and an Irish nationalist context.