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Palgrave Macmillan
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Romanticism and Popular Magic

Poetry and Cultures of the Occult in the 1790s

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

  • Examines a wide range of source material, from dramatic lyric to polemical tract
  • Examines work from a variety of writers, both canonical and less well-known
  • Addresses the Romantic era, which has been largely (and unjustly) overlooked by historians of British occult practice to date

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

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.



Authors and Affiliations

  • Independent Scholar, Surrey, UK

    Stephanie Elizabeth Churms

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).

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