The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modeity in Urban England, 1780-1914
by Karl Bell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 2012-03-26

ISBN-10: 1107002001

ISBN-13: 9781107002005

Language: English

Pages: 308
Added: 2012-06-17 11: 27: 16
Categories:
History > Europe
Body, Mind & Spirit > Occultism
Description:
This innovative history of popular magical mentalities in nineteenth-century England explores the dynamic ways in which the magical imagination helped people to adjust to urban life. Previous studies of mode popular magical practices and supeatural beliefs have largely neglected the urban experience. Karl Bell, however, shows that the magical imagination was a key cultural resource which granted an empowering sense of plebeian agency in the nineteenth-century urban environment. Rather than portraying magical beliefs and practices as a mere enclave of anachronistic ‘tradition’ and the fantastical as simply an escapist refuge from the real, he reveals magic’s adaptive and transformative qualities and the ways in which it helped ordinary people navigate, adapt to and resist aspects of mode urbanization. Drawing on perspectives from cultural anthropology, sociology, folklore and urban studies, this is a major contribution to our understanding of mode popular magic and the lived experience of modeization and urbanization