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Alchemy in contemporary fiction - Paul Ferguson - 10-10-2025
Alchemy in contemporary fiction: Old texts, new psychologies
By Carina Hart
"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."
https://www.academia.edu/91063854/Alchemy_in_contemporary_fiction_Old_texts_new_psychologies