Unconscious - The Literary Unconscious

Introduction

E.S. Dallas, Victorian journalist and aesthetician, devoted his two-volume The Gay Science to an account of the imagination and the kinds of pleasures it affords which, in a conventional manner, are contrasted with the workings of ‘reason’.

What is interesting here is the way that Dallas transforms traditional accounts of the inner and secret workings of genius into the Victorian language of the ‘unconscious’ and what he terms the ‘Hidden soul’: ‘It is in the hidden sphere of thought, even more than in the open one, that we live and move and have our being’ (Extract II).

Please select below to view scanned pages from 'The Gay Science':

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