B. W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension ...
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This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.Less
This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.
Peter Otto
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199567676
- eISBN:
- 9780191725364
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567676.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the ...
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Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.Less
Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.
