Many of the obsessions that characterized
fin de siècle
thought and literature also guided the
development of literary modernism. The hopeful, if sometimes odd, imperial
romances of the Victorian period became filled with more troubling visions .
In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlowe laments that the "blank
space" on the earth "had ceased to be a blank space of
delightful mystery--a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had
become a place of darkness."
Modernism and The Occult
Madame Blavatsky
Aleister Crowley
W. B. Yeats