Mysticism Murdoch et al

It's certainly been a while since I blogged on this site and I'm uncertain as to why the inspiration came today. Probably simply because we were updating Nell's baby blog and the whole blogsphere became a little less remote and abstract as a result. Obviously the big reason for this blog drought has been Nell's existence: she basically takes up most of our lives.
Still, not everything has been babydom.
I cant say I have written much but have had three concepts floating about for future written work:
1. to examine the concept and history of what I'm thinking of as 'Tory mysticism.' This is related to the last post on passive resistance, but basically I am interested in the so-called mystical turn of some of those who stand against the secular enlightenment and its political regimes. These would include cases like William Law and Coleridge but also figures like Joseph Conrad and maybe Schopenhauer who are not religious or Christian at all. So a new genealogy might open up.
2. related to this I'd like to think about the play between the tendencies towards the institutionalisation of belief and cultural practices and tendencies towards de-institutionalisation, so as to think about the category of the aesthetics as more or less cripplingly split between the two drives. Like the first topic, this emerges from my interest in the eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The essay that will appear in Studies in the Eighteenth Century or whatever it is called is a kind of prologomena to this.
3. and something completely different: I've become interested in a project I am thinking of as 'the literary experience and the emergence of the mass-market paperback'. I had the idea for this when I went to Melbourne last year with a paperback copy of Iris Murdoch's Bruno's Dream—a US Avon book. I found reading this book completely absorbing to a degree I hardly ever experience, and I realised that the intensity of this reading experience was connected to the physical object which was its occasion, the cheapo paper edition with its lurid cover. And that that kind of book no longer exists: literary paperbacks now have other design conventions and other marketing strategies. I also realised what is fairly obvious that the UK mass-market paperback in the fifties and sixties (dominated by Penguin) was very different from that of the US and that a comparative study of book design would have something to say about the structure of both country's literary field and literary experiences. So it's along those lines that I am collecting mass-market literary paperbacks up until about 1970. Something will come of this I suspect.