"Manifesting in the 19th Century: New Thought and the Emergence of Positive Thinking," a Lecture by Arielle Zibrak

New Thought was a nineteenth century secular spiritual practice that promised women across the country financial independence, sexual liberation, and a pathway to the realization of their desires. The most basic principle of New Thought is that the mind has the power to change outcomes in the physical world; they called this “the law of attraction,” a term still used today to refer to the “science” behind the practice of “manifestation." When we set an intention in a yoga practice, when we make a vision board, “energize” a crystal, or tell everyone we know that we’re going to lose twenty pounds to speak it into reality, we’re buying into the belief system New Thought pioneered.

Bio: Arielle Zibrak is Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming. The author of Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021), Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), and numerous essays in scholarly and public-facing venues including American Literature, Women's Studies, the New Yorker, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is also the editor of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Twelve Stories by American Women (Penguin Classics, 2025). Current projects include a video streaming series for The Great Courses called “A Literary Tour of the United States” and a public history of consumer feminism and new-age philosophy in America titled The Image of Desire.

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