Bewitched Pages: 20 Enchanting Witchcraft Storybooks - Gothic Tales Salem Trials Folklore and Fantastical Spells Across the Centuries

Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, Frederick Marryat, William Henry Giles Kingston, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Ruth Plumly Thompson, Margaret Alice Murray, William Stearns Davis, Ebenezer Wheelwright, John R. Musick, Robert Bloomer Hare Bell, Gertrude Crownfield, M. V. B. Perley, Joanna E. Wood, Anna Bronson Alcott Pratt, Pauline Bradford Mackie, Reginald Scot, Thomas Lambert Sappington, Wallace Notestein, Thomas Potts, Kenneth James Beatty

Summary

Bewitched Pages: 20 Enchanting Witchcraft Storybooks gathers witchcraft's many literary lives: feared crime, folkloric inheritance, gothic menace, occult speculation, and children's wonder. Its selections traverse early modern testimony and demonological debate, nineteenth-century historical romance and sensation fiction, maritime adventure, and fantastic tales for younger readers. The volume's particular strength lies in this tonal breadth: grim accounts of accusation and supernatural dread stand beside playful enchantments, making witchcraft visible not as a fixed motif but as a changing cultural language. The contributors form an unusually wide historical constellation. Early modern writers associated with witch trials, skepticism, and the recording of popular belief encounter Victorian and Edwardian novelists, historians of witchcraft, Gothic experimenters, and major architects of American fantasy. Figures such as H. P. Lovecraft, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, and Ruth Plumly Thompson appear within a larger transatlantic archive shaped by Puritan memory, Romantic antiquarianism, spiritualism, imperial adventure, and the emergence of modern fantasy. Together, these voices reveal how gender, authority, childhood, religion, and national folklore inform representations of magical power. This anthology is recommended for students of the fantastic, folklore, and cultural history, as well as general readers seeking an expansive introduction to witchcraft in literature. Its twenty works invite comparison across centuries and genres, offering both pleasure and intellectual provocation. Read collectively, they foster a rich dialogue between fear and delight, historical record and imaginative reinvention.

Available since: 03/04/2025.

Print length: 2000 pages.

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