Reviewed by: Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism ed. by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng Mark S. Morrisson (bio) SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND IRISH MODERNISM, edited by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. 405 pp. $39.52 cloth, $19.05 paper. Until relatively recently, scholarship on Irish modernism, science, and technology has often focused on W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and, above all, James Joyce. This is certainly understandable, given the international circulation and impact of their writing and the outsized role they still play in literature and theater programs. Indeed, the international circulation and international orientation of an author such as Joyce make an approach to Joyce and science necessarily international. But all too little research has addressed—in more than [End Page 213] a passing or general bio-critical way—the specifically Irish contexts of modernist literary engagements with science and technology or moved much beyond simply annotating literary allusions to science. While producing insightful readings, the narrow focus on a handful of modernist writers, often under a methodology unlikely to provide much complexity or nuance to the inter-relationships between Irish modernism and science, has tended to overlook the larger cultural, social, and political roles of science in twentieth-century Ireland. Exploring that history in relationship to Irish modernism could offer important insights into Ireland’s postcolonial narrative and provide a richer understanding of both Irish Revival literature and Irish modernism. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng have done just that in their thought-provoking collection Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism. This collection’s range of approaches and points of entry into its subject are a major strength. The editors divide the fifteen essays into five parts—“Revival Dynamics,” “Machine Fever,” “Sounds Modern,” “Body Trouble,” and “Strange Experiments”—to give shape to the terrain the essays cover, and there are outstanding interventions in all of these areas. Seán Hewitt’s “Natural History and the Irish Revival” explores the Irish “craze for amateur naturalist study” at the end of the nineteenth century, arguing that “there were a number of [Irish Revival] writers engaged in naturalist study who attempted to harness the discourses of natural science into narratives of spiritual resurgence” (19). Focusing on Emily Lawless, J. M. Synge, and Seumas O’Sullivan, Hewitt makes a strong case for “a migration of the spiritual or sublime to being seen as within, rather than beyond, physical nature” (21). Other chapters focus on machines and technology with excellent essays that should be of special interest to readers of the JJQ. Conrad’s “Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce” addresses Greer’s A Modern Dædalus in the context of military technologies and modern media developments to explore “the possibility that weapons technologies did not just mature alongside or make use of print” but instead “provided an alternative medium of expression, a different form of address, to the same public, and in so doing, shaped the public to which they were addressed and the ‘mental map’ that they shared” (82).1 And Damien Keane’s “His Remastered Voice: Joyce for Vinyl” traces the implications of institutional and technological change in the history of Joyce’s 1924 recording of a brief passage from “Aeolus.” The collection concludes with a strong set of three essays that demonstrates the breadth of approach and interpretation. Katherine Ebury’s “Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama: Ghosts in Yeats and Beckett” uses a literature and science interpretive framework to draw [End Page 214] together the science of relativity, Yeats’s occult preoccupations, and new stage-lighting technologies and experimental lighting techniques in Yeats and Beckett to undermine (or at least complicate) the not uncommon understanding of Yeats as antiscientific and to hint at a Beckett more related to Yeats’s occult interests than one might otherwise have understood. Andrew Kalaidjian’s “The Uncertainty of Late Irish Modernism: Flann O’Brien and Erwin Schrödinger in Dublin” explores scientific concepts of uncertainty in ways that sometimes make direct connections between the writings of Brian O’Nolan (as both Flann O’Brien and Myles...

Plutôt que d’étudier l’influence de la théosophie sur les débuts de l’art abstrait, cet article prend pour objet la culture visuelle de la théosophie elle-même, en particulier les efforts déployés par Annie Besant et C.W. Leadbeater pour utiliser les transcriptions visuelles de l’expérience clairvoyante comme données scientifiques. Ces données ayant rapidement revêtu une dimension esthétique, le monde invisible des particules subatomiques a suscité un croisement entre la physique atomique et de l’occultisme qui a influencé la culture visuelle de la théosophie. L’accent mis sur la recherche expérimentale a poussé cette dernière à se détacher de l’esthétique symboliste axée sur la rêverie pour s’intéresser à l’abstraction des transcriptions « scientifiques » en Thought-Forms et aux géométries abstraites de la Occult Chemistry.

In this recent publication of the always interesting Modernist Latitudes series, Donal Harris gives us the ambitious scholarly consideration of “big magazines” in or as American modernism that the field has needed for some time now. Several scholars whose work appears in the pages of JMPS have made key efforts to look at modernism in relation to larger circulation periodicals.1 And recent research has taken advantage of digital research tools for periodical studies, for example in the 2017 JMPS special issue “Digital Archives, Avant-Garde Periodicals” (2017). On Company Time makes an invaluable contribution to this recent turn by giving us a fresh, lucidly written, and significantly broad account of the modernism of a thriving industry in American commercial print culture. Harris does not simply provide instances of the literary and aesthetic experiments we often associate with small circulation little magazines in the 1910s and 1920s appearing instead in large, commercially successful periodicals, as his subtitle might suggest. Rather, he delivers a much more capacious argument about how the impact of the technological and institutional modernization of print media shaped, and in turn, were shaped by American literary modernism, and how, together, they contributed to the cultural juggernaut that, until the advent of the television age, helped articulate the “American century.”The strength of On Company Time is the dexterity with which Harris weaves together threads that might, in themselves, have been the sole subject of his monograph. The history of professionalization in American magazines is one such thread. By the end of the nineteenth century, audience and market-share competition began to move magazines away from the amateurish chaotic efforts publishing largely freelanced content toward a feature that newspapers had already adopted: the professional staff system (20). On Company Time lays out this history of professionalism clearly and charts the impact of a staff system as the bedrock of the commercially successful big magazine, but he weaves this account of professionalization together with an assessment of the distinct, and, in many ways modernist, contribution of the magazines he explores.The phenomenon that Harris calls the “big magazine” was not distinct simply for being large circulation and commercial in intention; indeed, it cut across several magazine sub-genres, including “the muckraking journal, the African American monthly, the newsmagazine, the photomagazine, and the men’s fashion monthly” (6). What makes these magazines so innovative, Harris argues, is that they “respond to commercial demands with formal solutions” by “experiment[ing] with … editorial voice,” “visual patterns,” and “‘house style’” (7). By focusing on form in these highly successful journals central to American cultural life, Harris articulates modernism’s constitutive role in the commercial print culture that later critics often understood it to be reacting against. Moreover, Harris’s approach challenges and reinterprets narratives emerging after midcentury about American modernism’s decline into tepid middlebrow culture. In Harris’s revisionary account, the trajectory of American modernism until the television age is much more complicated, and fascinatingly so.The professional endeavors of big magazines, as scholars of modernism and periodical studies have been aware for some time, involved a surprisingly large number of authors and visual artists we associate with American modernism. But Harris does not simply argue that some American modernists earned a living by working, for example, for McClure’s, The Crisis, or Esquire. He does not merely recount how Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, Fauset, or Du Bois paid their bills. Rather, Harris argues that “in addition to employing and publishing so many masscult-phobic novelists and poets whom we now consider modernist, these magazines’ experiments with the limitations and the possibilities of their medium echo the very formal tenets of modernism that popular magazines are often placed in opposition to” (8). This last point, made in other contexts by scholars such as Sean Latham, Bob Scholes, Ann Ardis, and Patrick Collier, augments efforts in modern periodical studies to bridge a rift that began in the academic disciplines of the 1930s and 1940s—little magazines, as a centerpiece of modernist studies, were the focus of English departments, whereas large commercial magazines were primarily studied in journalism programs.2Some readers might anticipate that Harris’s focus on “big magazines” will primarily document modernism’s move into the cultural mainstream in the 1940s and 1950s. Instead, Harris shows the extent to which modernism was already involved in the big magazines during the 1910s and 1920s and even earlier. Harris reveals a Cather who might have little time to write her own novels but played a key role as an invisible shaper through her work for McClure’s and a Du Bois whose central aesthetic and strategic contributions to The Crisis made it the key journal that it became under his tenure.On Company Time also greatly enhances our understanding of modernism in the culture of post-World War II America. The chapter on T. S. Eliot in Time is perhaps something of an outlier in that Eliot himself neither worked for the magazine nor used it as a venue for publishing his own work. Nevertheless, Harris makes a strong argument for looking not just at the importance of Eliot to modernism in 1922, but also at what his name’s appearance in a big magazine like Time might show us about the popularization of modernism and its timeline: “From 1923 to 1960, Eliot is mentioned in 420 articles, but between its first issue in 1923 and 1929, Time only mentions him five times. … In fact, Eliot’s peak does not occur until after World War II, when between 1950 and 1954 he is mentioned more than one hundred times. In 1950, he appeared in the magazine at least once every two weeks” (157). Henry Luce’s magazines, Time and Life, were the most profitable journals in the world during this period, and both devoted a great deal of attention to Eliot. Though Eliot had become a British citizen in 1927, Harris argues that Luce’s magazines essentially repatriated Eliot as an American poet, drawing him and The Waste Land firmly into Time’s own “American Century” project: “they both describe the contemporary scene in more accurate and efficient language. Modernist poetry no longer withholds meanings or forces the audience to read difficult texts; instead, it is exactly like Time, aggregating disparate types of knowledge into a uniform, accessible literary voice” (162). And this move in the magazine followed a logic of American power and influence in the world. As Harris puts it, “Whereas in the 1920s Time Inc. asserted its Americanism by deporting Eliot and his ‘new kind of literature,’ its postwar reclamation of Americans abroad suggests a new mission statement: the expansion of American cultural products into other national markets” (163). Through Time’s strategic and fulsome engagement with Eliot (and its frequent misreadings of Eliot’s Waste Land), Luce himself became the unlikely arbiter of American modernism’s cultural authority.Harris’s other major focus on post-World War II periodical culture becomes clear in his fascinating chapter on “Hemingway’s Disappearing Style.” Harris argues against the understanding that Hemingway’s terse prose style comes from his early years as a journalist, where he worked for compression and grappled with the technological constraints of the telegraph—producing something akin to what was known as “cablese.” Harris finds the telegraph argument suspect given that, as he puts it, “the technological shock of the telegraph and commentary on its ‘new language’ was quite old by the 1920s” (185), and he demonstrates that Hemingway’s early journalism was “surprisingly chatty” (185). Moreover, the verbose style of his contributions to the Toronto Star Weekly was actually common in the periodical.Following the fate of Hemingway’s style in his later career allows Harris to intervene in some surprisingly stubborn narratives about modernism’s decline at midcentury. Examining the history of Hemingway’s contract with Arnold Gingrich to publish in Esquire and Hemingway’s publication of The Old Man and the Sea in Luce’s Life, along with the increasing omnipresence of Hemingway the celebrity and Hemingway’s style in mid-century periodicals and advertisements, Harris argues that “maybe we can rethink the decline narrative of midcentury middlebrow as something more akin to mass modernism, where modernist difficulty is no longer difficult because it is everywhere. Perhaps Hemingway’s later style is not a slide into the commercial—it was always commercial—but a response to his own widespread influence, maybe even its obviousness. It’s not that Hemingway reads like an advertisement (or not just that) but that advertisements read like Hemingway” (188). In this sense, Hemingway becomes a mid-century modernist meme: “Hemingway is a character born out of his fiction, and the affectless monotone that characterizes Hemingway’s fiction—but not his journalism and nonfiction writing—becomes a widely circulating cultural style” (193).The Hemingway chapter, then, is key to Harris’s nuanced critique of the decline narratives that the New Modernist Studies and modern periodical studies have approached with healthy skepticism over the past few decades. While noting the flaws in narratives of the decline of modernism from some kind of initial purity into market-driven middlebrow banality may not be a new gesture, Harris is astute to refocus the interpretive payoff of such arguments. For example, he notes of a Dwight Macdonald’s prominent version of such an argument: “I find it more productive to consider Macdonald’s theory of the middlebrow as symptomatic rather than explanatory of the changes in literary and periodical culture after World War II” (27). For Harris, the decline of the big magazines themselves was inevitable once the television set became a central feature of a majority of American homes, in the decade from 1948 when they were in 1 percent of American homes to 1958 when they were in 80% (200).Harris’s interpretation of the major restructuring of culture by a technological shift in media attention with the rise of television, and the constriction of magazines that came with it allows him to offer an informed perspective on our own digital age and the challenges it poses to periodicals: The recent proliferation of eulogies for print’s demise, coupled with myriad new approaches to understanding print as a historical medium make the time seem ripe to look back on modernism’s life in the magazines. While the terms of the debates regarding new technologies, augmented professional practices, and media forms have altered in the twenty-first century media environment, the conversations have a long history, and they look remarkably familiar to the set of economic, aesthetic, and disciplinary concerns that accompanied the rise of the “big magazines” a century ago. (28) That project of looking at changes in media through a longer, historical lens has become an important focus in periodical studies in JMPS in recent years. For instance, the joint special issues of Modernism/modernity and JMPS emerging from Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier’s September 2010 symposium at the University of Delaware, “Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1890–1940,” invited us to defamiliarize modern magazines, considering them in terms of new media technologies and media theory. Donal Harris’s On Company Time makes a welcome and valuable contribution to such a project and enriches our understanding both of American modernism and of the periodical culture of the twentieth century, showing how essential both were to each other.

This article explores the apocalyptic fervor of 1917 as a context for the rise of the esoteric modernism of W. B Yeats and Aleister Crowley, paying special attention to the contributions of Crowley's Moonchild to a specifically modernist form of esoteric fiction. Moonchild featured a modernist synthesis of ritual, transpersonal epistemology, experimental prose, and a play of competing popular genres in a contemplative fiction that continued to impact twentieth-century culture well beyond the death of its author. This literature turned to communications with spirit entities and to ritual magic to reveal spiritual interpretations of a world in which the flux of modernity augured technologically sophisticated war as a permanent state of affairs, the world of 1917.

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An inter-domain chemistry and literature course at Penn State is a pedagogically innovative course co-taught by Chemistry and English faculty. The course teaches both the basic concepts of chemistry and their cultural elaboration in literature across the modern period. Students discuss how texts such as Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, WWI poetry, and White Noise, among others, mirror the cultural perceptions of science during their respective time periods and provides students with a nuanced understanding of how literature and science inform each other and negotiate cultural, religious, and political tensions. A principal aim of the course is to facilitate mutual informed dialog concerning science and society between students from a diverse set of majors.

Ithell Colquhoun and Occult Surrealism in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland Mark S. Morrisson (bio) Artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88) has been on the margins of surrealist scholarship for many years. In the last few decades, the few who have discussed her have acknowledged her either as a minor figure in histories of surrealism or as a practicing occultist and author of a significant book on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.1 This neglect of the full range of Colquhoun’s creative output—and, indeed, of the relationship between her surrealism and her occult investments—is unfortunate. One of the first to appreciate these connections was Richard Shillitoe, who has recently argued that “one of the reasons why automatism became central to Colquhoun’s work was because it provided her with methods that linked the surreal with the hermetic both philosophically and technically.”2 Exploring the cultural contexts of these procedural affinities and the disciplinary boundaries Colquhoun sought to destabilize reveals the interrelationships she saw among several seemingly disparate strands of culture and thought in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland—from fin-de-siècle occultism, surrealist automatism, British and Irish archaeology, and a pan-Celtic cultural revival in the first half of the century to the esoteric literature and the imaginative syntheses of science, spirituality, and alternative therapeutics that we identify with the “New Age” of the century’s latter years.3 Moreover, while Colquhoun’s occultism clearly engaged with modern psychology, she emphasized the epistemological contributions of her occult surrealism, its production of sources of knowledge. [End Page 587] Colquhoun’s dim presence in surrealist scholarship has to do, in part, with the dynamics of British surrealist groups during the Second World War. Colquhoun attended the Slade in the late 1920s and had been drawn into surrealism in 1936 upon visiting the International Exhibition of Surrealism in London. In 1939, she exhibited in Mesens’s London Gallery and published five writings in his London Bulletin. But in 1940 Mesens engineered her removal from the group after she refused to sign on to his new rules forbidding publication or exhibition in any nonsurrealist venues and membership in any secret societies.4 (These rules seemed to have been aimed at Colquhoun’s occult involvements.) Moreover, Colquhoun was on the losing side of a rift within the British surrealist scene during the war that pitted Toni del Renzio (with whom Colquhoun exhibited and to whom she was briefly married) against Mesens.5 Colquhoun continued to produce surrealist art and writings, not only using automatic processes in her work but also producing key articles on automatism. She also allied herself with a dissident group of surrealists in exhibitions and poetry readings and, later in her life, participated in new surrealist ventures through her exhibitions with the Continental-based Fantasmagie group and, in Britain, via the journal Melmoth.6 Like that of many modernists, Colquhoun’s thought surely owed a debt to the late nineteenth-century comparative mythology of James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890). But her interests reveal critical intersections among the intellectual currents of the 1920s to the 1940s and beyond. These strands of thought included a syncretism that drew its shape from the Golden Dawn and its hermetic successors as well as from the Theosophical Society and its foundational texts by H. P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and others. Moreover, they demonstrate the interpretive preoccupations of a later era—for example, the perennialism that Aldous Huxley most eloquently explored in The Perennial Philosophy (1946), Margaret Murray’s imaginative speculations about Stone Age cults, and Robert Graves’s Celtic-centered response to Frazer, The White Goddess (1948).7 As Colquhoun’s art and thought developed from her early years as a London-based surrealist painter in the 1930s and 1940s through her later life as an increasingly active writer living in Cornwall, it demonstrated an emerging understanding of automatism not simply as an aesthetic or even a purely psychological exploration but as an epistemological practice. In short, Colquhoun’s aesthetic practices were not meant simply to reveal the interior of the self or to explain subjective experience. Rather, they aimed toward a transpersonal epistemology...

Ezra Pound has long been seen as standard bearer, for good or for ill, of modernist cosmopolitanism and internationalism. While scholars have weighed significance of interest in reviving a specifically American literary culture, his espousal of ideas and aesthetics adapted from several cultures and movements has been many readers' first and abiding impression of literary, cultural, and political investments. In Pound's Places, Peter Nicholls has characterized The Cantos as marked by a visionary moment where specific markers of place can be sublated so as secure a landscape which is typical rather than particular. While Venice and Tempio in Rimini are described in some detail, Nicholls notes that landscapes of Italy and Provence are constantly overlaid by allusions a composite, mythological landscape which reduce specificity of particular places. poetic and political project was not that of a William Carlos Williams, who, in Contact, aimed to emphasize local phase of game of writing, foster an indigenous art in America. Pound is not remembered as a poet of local. Yet work of most modernist poets was more varied, more marked by potentially diverging aesthetics and even politics, than our efforts describe it might allow. For example, as Robert von Hallberg has shown in Libertarian Imagism, Donald Davie's oft-quoted pronouncement that the development from imagism in poetry fascism in politics is clear and unbroken is undermined by imagism's libertarian or antisocialist rather than protofascist political engagements in pre-WWI milieu. Indeed, by 1929, Pound was publishing in a most unexpected venue, a left-wing southwestern regionalist periodical, Morada, published out of Albuquerque, New Mexico by young Norman Macleod. attention had shifted, at least momentarily, that were highly inflected by a movement often seen as virtually antithetical cosmopolitanism and internationalism--American regionalism. Examining relationship Morada and his focus on regional and even regionalist little of Southwest provides us an alternative understanding of Pounds literary, political, and even economic aspirations between two wars. We can find in flirtation with cultural and political resources of American regionalism in late 1920s and early 1930s an American context for his politics--or obsessions--that have still been largely understood in contexts of European fascism. [section] In November 1930, Ezra Pound published a significant article on Small Magazines in English Journal, brought out by National Council of Teachers of English. Pound celebrated a revolt against somnolent elder magazines of eastern establishment, including Atlantic, Harpers, Scribner's, and Century. While praising London such as Egoist and New Age, he focused intensely upon smaller American magazines, beginning with Harriet Monroe's Poetry. Even Eliot's Criterion gets a nod for its Americanness: If Criterion is not strictly a magazine 'in United States,' it emerged definitely from American racial sources. But Pound also struck a note of concern about American letters: As I see it, 'we' in 1910 wanted set up civilization in America. By 1920 one wanted preserve vestiges or start a new one anywhere that one could. It should come as little surprise that Pound would seek publications outside American eastern literary establishment. Early on, Little Review itself had foregrounded writers from Chicago and other midwestern locations. One could easily hear in lament in Small Magazines a shift away from American nationalist project toward a defensive postwar expatriatism--one that would lead him not only increasingly away from America, but also away from London (his literary location during early modernist period) and even Paris. …

This article argues that Joyce's engagements with the Theosophy of the Dublin literary world amount to more than simple parody. In Ulysses, Joyce portrays Theosophy's efforts to offer an alternative understanding of physiology to that of the medical establishment as a form of boundary work, an adaptation of the discourse of modern medical research to fashion modern mysticism as a science. Ultimately, Joyce rejects Theosophical physiology and its evolutionary scientism because it provides an unsatisfactory rhetorical body, a failed attempt to renegotiate the boundaries between scientific materialism and spirituality in the awkward modernity of Dublin in 1904.

Exploring the periodicals of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival in Britain and America, this article argues that the spiritual practices of modern occultism took place at the intersection between the private and personal and the flamboyantly public —an intersection that marks their modernity and their debt to modern periodical culture. The ethos of the occult revival was predicated on a vogue for esotericism. Yet modernity drove the esoteric agenda of occult experiments in subjectivity, and it also opened doors to an occult presence in the public sphere via a vibrant print culture that engaged with the institutions of commercial publishing. The occult periodical press came into being to publicize occult ideas, to support emerging occult institutions and settle disputes within a counter-public sphere of occultism, and to legitimate occult knowledge in the dominant public sphere in quasi-scientific terms of validation.

Alchemists are generally held to be the quirky forefathers of science, blending occultism with metaphysical pursuits. Although many were intelligent and well-intentioned thinkers, the oft-cited goals of alchemy paint these antiquated experiments as wizardry, not scientific investigation. Whether seeking to produce a miraculous panacea or struggling to transmute lead into gold, the alchemists radical goals held little relevance to consequent scientific pursuits. Thus, the temptation is to view the transition from alchemy to modern science as one that discarded fantastic ideas about philosophers stones and magic potions in exchange for modest yet steady results. It has been less noted, however, that the birth of atomic science actually coincided with an efflorescence of occultism and esoteric religion that attached deep significance to questions about the nature of matter and energy. Mark Morrisson challenges the widespread dismissal of alchemy as a largely insignificant historical footnote to science by prying into the revival of alchemy and its influence on the emerging subatomic sciences of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Morrisson demonstrates its surprising influence on the emerging subatomic sciences of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, Morrisson examines the resurfacing of occult circles during this time period and how their interest in alchemical tropes had a substantial and traceable impact upon the science of the day. Modern Alchemy chronicles several encounters between occult conceptions of alchemy and the new science, describing how academic chemists, inspired by the alchemy revival, attempted to transmute the elements; to make gold. Examining scientists publications, correspondence, talks, and laboratory notebooks as well as the writings of occultists, alchemical tomes, and science-fiction stories, he argues that during the birth of modern nuclear physics, the trajectories of science and occultism--so often considered antithetical--briefly merged.

Abstract The interests of occult alchemists and mainstream chemists combined in the founding of the Alchemical Society in London in 1912. The mid-19th-century occult understanding of alchemy as primarily about spiritual transformation (so-called spiritual alchemy) and not material transmutation was supplanted by an increasing certitude that ancient and medieval alchemy had always been a material process, though one with spiritual implications. Reciprocally, scientists in the Alchemical Society came to see the relevance and even spiritual significance of alchemy to modern atomic science.

AbstractThis chapter discusses how the close relationship between Theosophical theories of matter and the new atomic science led Theosophists to launch a decades-long research program of “clairvoyant chemistry” in 1895. This research continued in the 20th century and has even occupied contemporary scientists in chemistry and physics.

Abstract This chapter describes a “transmutational gold rush” which happened between 1904 and the 1920s. Academic chemists, working in an alchemy revival, attempted to transmute elements, even to make gold. By the 1920s, these blendings of atomic science and occult alchemy begin to affect other domains of knowledge, particularly economics and monetary policy, eventually inspiring concerns about the gold standard in the 1920s and 1930s.