Phantasmagoria : spirit visions, metaphors, and media into the twenty-first century
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Bibliographic Information
Phantasmagoria : spirit visions, metaphors, and media into the twenty-first century
Oxford University Press, 2006
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 423-451) and index
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Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 idea 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 colour 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.
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
by "Nielsen BookData"