Magical Imagination
Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780-1914
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23496547 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Karl Bell (0000-0001-6578-289X) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Publication date | 2012-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Magical Imagination (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/cbo9780511740107 |
| ISBN | 9780511740107 |
| Open Library | OL34470016M |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 23 |
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 modern popular magical practices and supernatural 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 modern urbanization. Drawing on perspectives from cultural anthropology, sociology, folklore and urban studies, this is a major contribution to our understanding of modern popular magic and the lived experience of modernization and urbanization.
Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West
Pin-Swallowing and Self-Destruction in Early Modern British and Irish Supernatural Narratives
Masculinity, Modernity and Male Baldness, c.1880‐1939
What’s Up Doc? Seventh Sons in Victorian and Edwardian Lancashire
Magic in Common and Legal Perspectives
Colonial Magic
Early Greco-Roman Antiquity
Magic in the Postcolonial Americas
‘They Are Without Christ and Without Hope’
Manifesto
Superstitious observations
Public bogies and supernatural landscapes in North-Western England in the 1800s
Ghosts and hidden geographies
Taking Money from Strangers
A Terrific Ogre’
Them Owls Know’
Magic and Fate in Eighteenth-Century London
Magic and the British Middle Classes, 1750–1900
The enchanted path
Magic and the Postsecular
Magic, Modernity, and Orientalism
The Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Democratisation of Magic in Post-Reformation England
The Iron in the Posthole
| Citations per year | 1.92 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2025 (12) |
| Highly cited | No |