Romanticism and Popular Magic: Poetry and Cultures of the Occult in the 1790s

by Stephanie Elizabeth Churms

Overview

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 witha reliance on ultimately incarcerating systems of superstition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030048099
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	01/17/2019
Series:	Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
Edition description:	1st ed. 2019
Pages:	303
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stephanie Elizabeth Churms completed her PhD at Aberystwyth University in September 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Damian Walford Davies. Her first article, ‘“There was One Man at Llyswen that could Conjure”: John Thelwall – Cunning Man’, was published in the July 2013 edition of Romanticism. She has also presented papers at several international conferences, including ‘The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations, 1640-1830’ (2011), ‘Locating Revolution: Place, Voice, Community, 1780–1820’ (2012), ‘Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality and Visual Culture’ (2014), and the Bicentennial Keats Conference ‘John Keats: Poet-Physician, Physician-Poet, 1815-1821’ (2015).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. A Profile of Romantic-period Popular Magic: Taxonomies of Evidence.- 3. Adjacent Cultures and Political Jugglery.- 4. John Thelwall's Autobiographical Occult.- 5. Lyrical Ballands and Occult Identities.- 6. Coleridge and Curse.- 7. Robert Southey's Conservative Occult.- 8. Conclusion.