Romanticism and Popular Magic

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.