Forsaken Magic- Witch of the Thorn

✍ Scribed by Chris Turner

• Book ID: 100369755
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 177 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ASIN: B07D7V5G3D

✦ Synopsis

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.;Intro; Acknowledgements; Contents; Chapter 1: Introduction; Engaging the Romantic Occult; Critical Limits; The 1790s Occult: Historical and Literary Contours; Chapter 2: A Profile of Romantic-Period Popular Magic: Taxonomies of Evidence; First-Hand Experiences of Popular Magic: The Paucity of Evidence; Case Study 1: Writing Cunning Men; Case Study 2: Didacticism -- Educating Readers Out of Superstition; Case Study 3: Starry Sedition and The Conjuror's Magazine; Chapter 3: Adjacent Cultures and Political Jugglery; The Proximity of Popular Prophecy; Astrology and Political Prognostication