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.

Offering enchantment to a disenchanted age, this intelligent, lyrical, and multifaceted book explores the perennial appeal of romance, and its essential role in art, philosophy, history, literature, and humans' relationships with each other and with the natural world. Expanding the idea of romance far past boy-girl sentimentality, Barbara Lazear Ascher defines it as yearning, hope, and reverence for the unattainable that can redeem passion, imagination, and civilization in our everyday lives. Provocative and enlightening, Dancing in the Dark challenges the readers to perceive and experience what matters in life, engaging their hearts as well as their minds. -- Barbara Lazear Ascher is a contributing editor at Self with a monthly column. -- Ascher's work has appeared in Elle, Vogue, European Travel and Life, Redbook, Mademoiselle, and many other magazines.

Convinced that the end of the world was at hand, many Romantic women writers assumed the role of the female prophet to sound the alarm before the final curtain fell. Orianne Smith argues that their prophecies were performative acts in which the prophet believed herself to be authorized by God to bring about social or religious transformation through her words. Utilizing a wealth of archival material across a wide range of historical documents, including sermons, prophecies, letters and diaries, Orianne Smith explores the work of prominent women writers - from Hester Piozzi to Ann Radcliffe, from Helen Maria Williams to Anna Barbauld and Mary Shelley - through the lens of their prophetic influence. As this book demonstrates, Romantic women writers not only thought in millenarian terms, but they did so in a way that significantly alters our current critical view of the relations between gender, genre, and literary authority in this period.

Finding that romance novels are an important literary genre not only because they comprise nearly half of paperback fiction sold, but also because they employ sympathetic values and identifiable conventions, critics present 12 studies analyzing a selection of specific conventions, patterns, themes, and images and trace them back to origins in folktales or fairy tales and back again to the latest adaptations available in the supermarkets. No index. Paper edition (778-0), $21.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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.

3 magical sisters. 3 funny paranormal love stories. Just outside the shifter town of Greysden sits Rosewater Manor, a place shrouded in magic. The Rosewater sisters all have special gifts, although sometimes they're a bit glitchy. At least until they find true love… This three book midlife romance collection includes: Love Potion Psychic Flashes Kitchen Magic About the "Magical Midlife" series: Just outside the shifter town of Greysden sits Rosewater Manor, a place shrouded in magic. The Rosewater women and their friends all have special gifts, although sometimes they're a bit glitchy. At least until they find true love… Check out these instalove romantic comedies if you enjoy fated mates who start off as rejected mates, midlife characters, eccentric small towns, nosy friends and family intent on matchmaking, steamy scenes, and sweet happily ever afters. keywords: paranormal romance, romantic comedy, rom-com, romcom, fated mate, rejected mate, witch, psychic, wolf, wolf shifter, shifter, shapeshifter, instalove, love at first sight, small town, magic, fantasy, light, funny, humor, action & adventure, humorous, family, sisters

The Handbook to Romanticism Studies is an accessible and indispensible resource providing students and scholars with a rich array of historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism. Focuses on British Romanticism while also addressing continental and transatlantic Romanticism and earlier periods Utilizes keywords such as imagination, sublime, poetics, philosophy, race, historiography, and visual culture as points of access to the study of Romanticism and the theoretical concerns and the culture of the period Explores topics central to Romanticism studies and the critical trends of the last thirty years