Romanticism and Popular Magic: Poetry and Cultures of the Occult in the 1790s by Stephanie Elizabeth Churms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Hardcover

Stephanie Elizabeth Churms. Romanticism and Popular Magic: Poetry and Cultures of the Occult in the 1790s, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hardcover. 303 pages. 

Condition: Very Good. Slightly bumped corners (see photos). 

Description from the publisher: 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.