Occult Revival: Lewis Spence’s Weird Renaissance

Lyall, Scott

Abstract

This paper suggest that Lewis Spence’s work – or some of it: specifically, some of his poetry in Scots – evokes the sense of 'The Weird' as defined by Mark Fisher; that is, as Fisher writes in his Introduction to The Weird and the Eerie (2016): ‘the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it’ (p. 10). The paper illustrates this by examining a poem from Spence's pamphlet, Weirds & Vanities, published in 1927 by The Porpoise Press. It goes on to suggest that there is a wider point to be developed about what Spence’s Weird work means for our understandings of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, as well as for Spence’s somewhat marginal place in the canon of renaissance writers.

Citation

Lyall, S. (2024, July). Occult Revival: Lewis Spence’s Weird Renaissance. Paper presented at The World Congress of Scottish Literatures, University of Nottingham, England

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: The World Congress of Scottish Literatures
• Start Date: Jul 3, 2024
• End Date: Jun 8, 2024
• Acceptance Date: Sep 29, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 28, 2024
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed