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 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 witha reliance on ultimately incarcerating systems of superstition.