University Press of America
Pages: 154
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7618-3674-2 • Paperback • May 2007 • $49.99 • (£38.00)
June Leavitt is an independent scholar and writer who has received much critical acclaim for her books and articles. She is the creator of a college course on spirituality in literature that she has taught at the Overseas Students Program at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
Part 1 List of Illustrations
Part 2 Preface
Chapter 3 Introduction
Chapter 4 The Hermetic Magician: "Red Hanrahan"
Chapter 5 The Cards in Madam Sosostris's Hand: An Empty Sign System
Chapter 6 The Tarot in Kafka
Chapter 7 Tarot and the Spiritual Autobiography of T.S. Eliot
Chapter 8 The Psychic Symbols of Frank Kafka
Chapter 9 Tarot and the Masked Life of W.B. Yeats
Chapter 10 Putting All the Cards on the Table
Part 11 Bibliography
Leavitt's book maps out the Tarot and its symbolic world in the sphere of literary criticism more clearly than any other work on this subject. For those who wish to more fully enter the symbolic world of Yeats, Eliot, and Kafka, Esoteric Symbols will guide them and enrich their understanding of a subject too often obscured by prejudice. Even though Yeats, Eliot, and Kafka wrote in an age of materialism, as artists they were nevertheless drawn to the symbolic world of the Tarot, rich in an iconographic language that is both subtle and seductive despite its rivalry with twentieth century cynicism.
— Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, Author of Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production and a contributing writer to Women Reading