Romanticism and Popular Magic [electronic resource] : Poetry and Cultures of the Occult in the 1790s / by Stephanie Elizabeth Churms.

9783030048105

Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

1 online resource (X, 303 p).

Access is available to the Yale community.

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This book explores how Romanticism was shaped by practices of popular magic. It seeks to identify the place of occult activity and culture – in the form of curses, spells, future-telling, charms and protective talismans – in everyday life, together with the ways in which such practice figures, and is refigured, in literary and political discourse at a time of revolutionary upheaval. What emerges is a new perspective on literature’s material contexts in the 1790s – from the rhetorical, linguistic and visual jugglery of the revolution controversy, to John Thelwall’s occult turn during a period of autobiographical self-reinvention at the end of the decade. From Wordsworth’s deployment of popular magic as a socially and politically emancipatory agent in Lyrical Ballads, to Coleridge’s anxious engagement with superstition as a despotic system of ‘mental enslavement’, and Robert Southey’s wrestling with an (increasingly alluring) conservatism he associated with a reliance on ultimately incarcerating systems of superstition.

Springer ENIN.

Books / Online

English

February 04, 2019

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