Synopses & Reviews
Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself. Moving from Wax to Film, the book also discusses key questions of imagination and cognition, and probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception; it uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture. It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing ideas about the self. Phantasmagoria also tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces. As the story unfolds, the book features the many eminent men and women--scientists and philosophers--who in the Society of Psychical Research applied their considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance seances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. The book shows how this often embarrassing story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in psychology and physics.
Over a sequence of twenty-eight chapters, with over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria thus tells an unexpected and often uncomfortable story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self as in the case of the zombie, a popular figure of soulessness, in modern times.
Review
"This book is a powerful statement."--
Hilary Mantel,The GuardianUNEDITED UK
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"It is a book of wonders."--
Hilary Mantel,The GuardianUNEDITED UK
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"
Review from previous edition ...often manages splendidly vivid pictorial evocations ... a bold, imaginative and provocative study, with a range few other writers would dare."--
Carolyne Larrington, Times Literary SupplementUNEDITED UK
Review
"It is a book of wonders."--
Hilary Mantel,The GuardianUNEDITED UK
Review
"Frighteningly literate and well-informed"--
Roz Kaveney, Time OutUNEDITED UK
Review
"She is exquisitely alive not just to ideas and arguments, but also to the jag and whiff and tang of things"--
Steven Connor, The IndependentUNEDITED UK
Review
"As always Warner's scholarship, eclecticism and inventiveness dazzle."--
Bel Mooney, The TimesUNEDITED UK
Review
"Phantasmagoria is a fascinating history of spirited bodies and haunted machines, but a reminder too of why the metaphors still get under our skin"--
Brian Dillon, Daily TelegraphUNEDITED UK
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"A densely layered book"--
Mike Dash, Sunday TelegraphUNEDITED UK
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"Phantasmagoria is a cabinet of familiar wonders: a jetting, generous, humane spree of thought, richly quickened by the life it finds within us and abroad, in our media and machineries of mind."--
Stephen Connor, The Independent"Phantasmagoria is a well-argued, inspiring study...For scholars interested in the fantastic in the arts, Phantasmagoria should be thought-provoking reading because it deals in an original way with questions of how to represent the unseen, imagined, and visionary."--Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
Review
"The general effect is rather like that of reading through a first-class encyclopedia."--
Nigel Barley, Times Higher Education SupplementUNEDITED UK
Review
"Marina Warner is particularly well-equipped to conduct this investigation"--
Steven Connor, The IndependentUNEDITED UK
Review
Synopsis
With over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria takes readers on an intellectually exhilarating tour of ideas of spirit and soul in the modern world, illuminating key questions of imagination and cognition. Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.
Synopsis
With over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria takes readers on an intellectually exhilarating tour of ideas of spirit and soul in the modern world, illuminating key questions of imagination and cognition. Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.
Synopsis
With over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria takes readers on an intellectually exhilarating tour of ideas of spirit and soul in the modern world, illuminating key questions of imagination and cognition. Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story
about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and
uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.
"Marina Warner is one of our most erudite and morally serious writers.... Phantasmagoria is her most ambitious book, an intellectually dazzling struggle with how the modern world (beginning roughly in the Renaissance) has imagined the stuff of souls, the nature of the psyche, the 'mysterious,
elusive, and ethereal' thing that somehow distinguishes the truly dead from the living and makes us who we are."
--Thomas Laqueur, The Nation
About the Author
Marina Warner is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at St. Andrew's University, Scotland. An acclaimed novelist and mythographer, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Introduction: The Logic of the Imaginary
I. Wax
1. Living Likenesses, Death Masks
2. Anatomies and Heroes: Madame Tussaud's
3. On the Threshold: Sleeping Beauties
II. Air
4. The Breath of Life
5. Winged Spirits and Sweet Airs
III. Clouds
6. Clouds of Glory
7. Fata Morgana
8. Very Like a Whale . . .
IV. Light
9. The Eye of the Imagination
10. Fancy's Images; Insubstantial Pageants
V. Shadow
11. Phantasmagoria or, Darkness Visible
12. The Origin of Painting or, the Corinthian Maid
VI. Mirror
13. The Danger in the Mirror: Narcissus
14. Double Vision
15. The Camer Steals the Soul
VII. Ghost
16. 'Stay This Moment': Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Dodgson
17. Spectral Rappers, Psychic Photographers
18. Phantoms to the Test: The Society for Psychical Research
VIII. Ether
19. Soul Vibrations or, The Fluidic Invisible
20. Time Travel and Other Selves
21. Exotic Visitors, Multiple Lives
22. Touching the Unknown
IX. Ectoplasm
23. Materializing Mediums: The Quest for Ectoplasm
24. The Rorschach Test, or Dirty Pictures
X. Film
25. Nice Life, and Extra's
26. Disembodied Eyes: The Culture of Apocalypse
27. Our Zombies, Our Selves
Conclusion