Romanticism and popular magic : poetry and cultures of the occult in the 1790s /
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 i...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cham, Switzerland :
Palgrave Macmillan,
[2019]
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| Series: | Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and cultures of print.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| Physical Description: | x, 303 pages ; 22 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-297) and index. |
| ISBN: | 3030048098 9783030048099 |