Abstract
The occult-surgical experiments at the heart of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and “The Inmost Light” demonstrate results that conflict with accepted science even as they rely on established conventions such as empirical evidence. Edith Nesbit’s short stories “The Three Drugs” and “The Five Senses” emphasise expanded sensory experience as a way of knowing radical weird realities. Weird tales become narrative laboratories in which the limits of scientific methods and epistemology are expanded to encompass new relationships between the seen and unseen, between matter and spirit.
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Alder, E. (2020). Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit. In: Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_3
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