Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama & by Ryan Curtis Friesen PAPERBACK

Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama & CultureAuthor(s): Ryan Curtis Friesen\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Liverpool University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Liverpool University Press\nISBN-13: 9781845199593, 978-1845199593\nSynopsis\nMagic and the supernatural are common themes in the philosophy and fiction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book explores varieties of scepticism and belief exhibited by a selection of philosophers and playwrights, including Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton, explicating how each author defines the supernatural, whether he assumes magic to operate in the world, and how he uses occult principles to explain what can be known and what is ethical. Beliefs and claims concerning impossible phenomena and superhuman agency require literary historians to determine whether an occult system of magical operation is being described in a given .