Romanticism and Popular Magic

Romanticism and Popular Magic
Author: Stephanie Elizabeth Churms
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2019-01-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030048101

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.

Keats and English Romanticism in Japan

Keats and English Romanticism in Japan
Author: Akiko Okada
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2006
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9783039107872

This book shows why Keats and Romanticism appeal to the Japanese mind, and how English Romantic poetry has found its way into Japanese literature. The first part analyses the reception of Romanticism in Japan before and after World War II and then focuses on the Japanese reception of Keats and the translation of Keats' poetry. The second part of the book deals with the medical aspect in Keats' poetry, his treatment of the supernatural, and his distinctive use of words.

Romanticism and Popular Magic

Romanticism and Popular Magic
Author: Stephanie Elizabeth Churms
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783030048099

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.

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism
Author: Paul Cheshire
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786948729

This first annotated edition of William Gilbert’s enigmatic poem, The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue, with extended interpretative chapters informed by Gilbert’s magical and astrological writings, shows how its dark materials fed the imaginations of his friends Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, in their formative years between 1795 and 1798.

Romantic Egypt

Romantic Egypt
Author: Elizabeth A. Fay
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021-04-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793635684

Romantic Egypt: Abyssal Ground of British Romanticism traces the historical, cultural and intellectual affiliations between Ancient Egypt and Romantic-period Britain and Germany, including the influences contributed by European thought, politics, and interventions such as Napoleon’s 1799 Egyptian Campaign. Until the contributions of Napoleon’s expedition to scientific knowledge of Ancient Egyptian monuments and ruins, Egypt had been largely swathed in mystical explanations of its past, its achievements, its beliefs, and its cultural importance; however, the increased knowledge about Ancient Egypt competed with the allure of a more mythically imbued antiquity in the Romantic imagination. Romantic Egypt argues that this balance between knowing and not-knowing, between deciphering and imagining a golden-age Egypt, between enlightened thought and mysticism, was essential to the development of the Romantic imaginary because, for the Romantics, western philosophy and art had their birth in the all-but-lost wisdom of Ancient Egypt.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose
Author: Robert Morrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 993
Release: 2024-04-18
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0192571494

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.