Dennis Denisoff: 'Eco-Feminism and the Neo-Pagan Movement'

Описание: The British neo-pagan movement was a cultural and spiritual phenomenon that ran from roughly 1870 to 1930. Predominantly pantheistic and characterised by respect for and worship of nature or certain of its elements, neo-paganism was also shaped by other contemporary interrogations of the status quo, such as the suffrage and women’s rights movements; increased interest in female-driven occult practices, such as spiritualism and Theosophy; and post-Darwinian conceptions of women’s relationships to nature. In return, British neo-pagans offered vibrant new perspectives for addressing the chafing limits of conventional gendered identity models. This talk focuses on how neo-paganism’s non-human-centred interests contributed to a burgeoning eco-feminism on less conventionally heteronormative terms. More specifically, the talk engages with works by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and Fiona McLeod (William Sharp) to explore ways in which women’s relations to nature were used to formulate trans-species models of sensual self-realisation.

Dennis Denisoff is the McFarlin Endowed Chair of English at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film, co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, and editor of The Decadent and Occult Works of Arthur Machen. His talk is part of his work for his forthcoming book, tentatively entitled Pagan Ecology in British Literature and Culture: 1860-1920.