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 literatures material contexts in the 1790s from the rhetorical, linguistic and visual jugglery of the revolution controversy, to John Thelwalls occult turn during a period of autobiographical self-reinvention at the end of the decade. From Wordsworths deployment of popular magic as a socially and politically emancipatory agent in Lyrical Ballads, to Coleridges anxious engagement with superstition as a despotic system of mental enslavement, and Robert Southeys wrestling with an (increasingly alluring) conservatism he associated with a reliance on ultimately incarcerating systems of superstition.
- | Author: Stephanie Elizabeth Churms
- | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
- | Publication Date: Feb 06, 2019
- | Number of Pages: 313 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Hardcover
- | ISBN-10: 3030048098
- | ISBN-13: 9783030048099