“The brilliance of The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale is its intellectual courage and sure footedness in contextualizing complexity of subjectivity in the nineteenth century when the many ways of knowing the world were implicated in a competition for political dominance that insisted on the exclusion of any alternatives...[T]he book’s virtues in exposing the intellectual dynamic of the beginning of the modern age make it valuable even for those not intimately engaged in literary study.”—Leonardo Reviews