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Investigates the history of the stereopticon as a radically modernized magic lantern and its place in a larger US media formation. Using random word searches, its arch of popularity is traced from the 1860s to an 1890s apex, followed by a gradual decline. The coincidence of its emergence with the term “illustrated lecture” is noted, pointing towards the initial formation of the documentary tradition. Circa 1850 the Frederick and William Langenheim developed the photographic glass slide: a key element of the stereopticon dispositif. Ten years later John Fallon introduced the stereopticon as a form of screen entertainment. In 1871, the stereopticon began to be used for outdoor advertising; soon after it was used to promote candidates and issues.

Chapter one, “Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject of Reason,” is dedicated to developing the book’s core argument that early modern devices for casting an image--the camera obscura, the magic lantern, and their variants--constituted a way of knowing, a method with power-producing effects, that I characterize as “paranoid projection.” The chapter does so via the double move of providing a media genealogy for Freud’s theory of projection and by analyzing the magic lantern, camera obscura, and their variants as uncertain and incomplete exercises in paranoid projection. It makes the bi-directional historical argument that the theory of paranoid projection was developed from early modern devices for casting an image that also engaged in the very dynamics described by the theoretical concept. The chapter opens with Freud’s writings on projection and introjection. Rather than just rehearse the arguments of the well-known texts in which Freud casts out religion as a form of delusion (Civilization and its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, and The Future of an Illusion), I focus especially on the case study of the painter Christoph Haitzmann published in 1923 as “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,” setting it in important relation to Freud’s more familiar work on paranoid projection in the case of Schreber. The chapter critically questions the way in which the camera obscura has come to be construed as the model of a rational vision exercised by metropolitan European men of science. Setting the camera obscura in relation to the magic lantern and other uses of the dark room for the casting of images, the chapter examines early modern technologies for casting an image as an interrelated complex of optical machines that functioned as spectacular pedagogical tools, endeavoring to produce reason by trafficking in its seeming inverse, the wonder and magic for which the magic lantern was named. I analyze early modern texts on optics, mathematics, and physics from Johannes Kepler to Willem Jacob ‘sGravesande to account for the complex and contradictory interplay between instruments, cast images, and critiques of superstition and denunciations of the vulnerable spectator that frequently framed their presentation. The chapter explores the way in which early modern use of devices for image-casting engaged in an ambivalent dynamic of desire and fear between men, the goal of which was the production of the masculinized subject of rational vision, and argues that the production of this subject depended on the vigilant demonstration and subjective internalization of a paranoid version of projection.

This chapter looks at the reception of Haydn’s Creation to show the entry of visual technologies into musical discourse, and the consequences for aesthetic judgment. Johann Triest found the oratorio like a magic lantern, a damning comparison: the magic lantern was a vulgar entertainment, and merely mechanical in operation. Carl Friedrich Zelter, by contrast, drew on the more refined shadow-play to redeem the oratorio’s visual appeal. For Zelter, likening The Creation to technological spectacles such as the shadow-play aligned the work with modern successes at controlling nature, and supported the image of Haydn as a master of tones. While Haydn’s use of tone-painting in The Creation was censured by early critics and has been a focus for modern scholars, comparisons of the work to moving-image entertainments point beyond the issue of musical imitation to other dimensions (such as patterns of alternation between voice and orchestra) that carried visual associations for turn-of-the-nineteenth-century listeners. Through its polarized reception, Haydn’s Creation helped establish the vexed relation of musical works to moving images in the nineteenth century, as novel music-image presentations like the nocturnorama drew inspiration from the oratorio, and critics voiced suspicion of anything visual-mechanical encroaching upon the musical.

This chapter, written by Joss Marsh, suggests that visual culture in the nineteenth century cannot only be characterized by its fascination with what Tom Gunning calls, in Chapter Nine, ‘technological exposure’, but also with instruments of deception and illusion such as the magic lantern. Marsh recalls the primacy of this popular toy, educational tool, and story-telling device, investigating the role of the lantern and in particular one of its techniques (the ‘ancestor of the cinematic dissolve’) and its manifestations in Victorian print cultures. The lantern dissolve both animated and was reflected in several key texts, ranging from the prominent (Charles Dickens) to the more obscure (James Anthony Froude). In her reading, Marsh charts the extensive cultural and creative impact that the lantern had on mainstream Victorian literary production, implying an inherent and often overlooked imbrication of the technological and the literary, the visual, and the textual.

This chapter takes Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as a representative example of the ‘waking dreams’ constructed by gothic fictions. In so doing, it reconceptualizes some of the key features of gothic fiction: its unprecedented mixing of conventions designed to represent the actual world with those normally deployed to evoke the marvellous; its ability to evoke in readers a powerful sense of the reality of its unreal worlds; and the consequent power of these virtual-realities to rouse the emotions of those who enter them. The argument begins with an account of John Locke's use of the camera obscura and magic lantern to illustrate the distinction between sensation and imagination, reason and passion, the real and the virtual; and it draws on the sensational psychology of David Hume, in which the mind itself is ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance’.

Chapter two, “Empire through the Magic Lantern,” takes up the psychoanalytic concept of morbid projection to provide an account of the shaping of not just the fortress ego but its violent abjections as well as to show how it is possible to psychoanalyze colonialism in tandem with a decolonization of psychoanalysis. From Anne McClintock's own use of Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection as "something rejected from which one does not part" to Homi Bhabha's formulation in "Sly Civility" of the subject of colonial authority as never free of its "scapegoat fantasy" that makes "him" or the "master" not a fortified castle but a "frontier station of joint occupation," versions of the psychoanalytic concept of projection have provided some of the main tools for postcolonial criticism. I argue that the psychoanalytic concept of projection takes us not only to an important problematization of the binaries of "self" and "other." It also takes us to the very techniques, in a material sense, for their attempted production. Through its case studies the chapter elaborates the magic lantern as a ready theoretical vehicle and satiric trope for demonstrating the extent to which an "Asia," "Africa," or "America" failed to function as a blank screen that stayed safely “over there” because of the ways this device is so fused and infused with what it mediated.

This introductory chapter examines an excerpt of C. G. Jung’s dream of flying instruments of projection in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Metaphors derived from modern philosophical instruments such as telescope, camera obscura, and magic lantern are used as projective apparatuses for the actions of the unconscious part of the mind. The chapter sets out the Scenes of Projection as a structured exercise of narrating the readings from the image projection, and is later used for conducting psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud had also contributed to the realization of the subject matter.

This chapter examines the dynamic media environment of Regency London through the lens of three very different convergences between literary and visual media. The first, Jane and Ann Taylor’s Signor Topsy-Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern emanates from a network of writers that channelled Lockean models of the mind into experimental visual and textual interactions. The second example, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington’s The Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1823) enlists the fluid dissolve of one lantern slide into the next to materialise the associative flow of reverie as she wanders through Regency London’s various attractions. The third example is Pierce Egan’s playful alignment of reading and looking through a camera obscura in The True History of Tom and Jerry; or The Day and Night Scenes, of Life in London (1821). Recalling reading Egan as a child, William Makepeace Thackeray described Life in London as an invitation to let his mind wander through the long-gone diversions of Regency London, this chapter reconsiders this response alongside Blessington’s Magic Lantern in the context of an emerging psychological preoccupation with the involuntary aspects of reading, viewing and the mind’s dynamic generation of moving images in states of reverie or dreaming.

This chapter offers a consideration of the magic lantern slide from a series of viewpoints giving overlapping ways of thinking about what it is as an artefact, how it works as a component of a narrative and performance medium, and its significances in historical and contemporary contexts of creative use. With illustrations from the Lucerna web resource, institutional and private collections, and the work of the Million Pictures research project, the chapter considers the physicality of slides as objects; their relative cultural (and financial) valuations; their various roles and motivations in the transference and concealment of knowledge; their relationships with other portions of the projection process; and some parallels between historic usage of slides and modern media practices, especially in the complex mixture of ‘authority’ and ‘freedom’ that determines their use and interpretation. Conventional approaches to what is sometimes called the ‘historical art of projection’ can be prone to dwell on one or two of these aspects, often with an emphasis on the visual content of the slide image or the physical nature of the artefact. However, to begin to understand the overall cultural impact of this largely lost medium we need to open out the discussion beyond its component parts and consider its possible uses, both historical and current. This chapter therefore aims to describe lantern slide projection as an interactive, ephemeral performance medium, elusive and difficult to categorize, but rich in its creative possibilities.

This chapter takes the decade of the birth of cinema, the 1890s, as a vantage point and tackles the question of how, by that time, the slum has become a topic of high visibility in various media. The author identifies the notion of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin) as this era’s key paradigm, because clichéd slum imagery and sensationalist stories (of violent crime, immorality, abject poverty etc.) travel around 1890 across (old and new) media, from the stage to the cinema, from photo books to magic lantern shows. The chapter focuses thereby on the ‘documentary impulse’ (Gunning) to disclose urban pauperisation, which emerges together with the photographic apparatus and the reform movement. Accordingly, the chapter’s case example, a famous reformist photo book / magic lantern lecture which promotes the urgent need to improve the housing conditions in New York’s notorious neighbourhood Five Points, How The Other Half Lives (Riis 1890), illustrates how reform movement, technological innovation and remediation go hand in hand. The chapter finally draws comparisons to a contemporary transmedia project, The Places We Live (Bendiksen 2008), in order to demonstrate the (dis-)continuities between nineteenth and twenty-first century documentary photography of slums.

The final chapter traces how delirium tremens shaped representations of pathological drinking in mid nineteenth-century popular culture. Finding depictions of the disease in the writings of some of the most popular and enduring authors of the nineteenth century, such as Edgar Allan Poe, T. S. Arthur, George Dugganne, Robert Byrd, and George Lippard and in some of the most popular melodramas of the era, such as The Drunkard: Or, The Fallen Saved!! and Ten Nights in a Barroom, the chapter asks why were graphic enactments of white men suffering the violent insanity of delirium tremens so fascinating to middle-class audiences? The chapter argues that Americans’ perverse fascination with delirium tremens highlighted deep conflicts in attitudes towards drinking and, more broadly, in the ascendant requirements for success and respectability. Narratives of pathological drinking demonstrate a powerful desire for transcendent experience, and a release from the responsibilities, anxieties, and imperatives of the new middle-class selfhood.

This chapter explores film exhibition in the 1890s and 1900s in light of evidence for the musical accompaniment of forms of screen media produced in London from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Early films are also considered in terms of remediation, such as the emergence of films inspired by popular song titles at the turn of the century, and the fact that popular songs formed the principal content for the various synchronized sound systems developed in the 1900s. This chapter thus provides historical evidence that in London music would likely have been used to accompany early film exhibition from the inception of the medium.

The final chapter of this study analyses Sor Juana’s most perplexing auto, El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo. It argues that the key to understanding the play lies in its engagement with Neostoic writings on constancy. Thus, the play can be seen to present Hermenegild as the ideal Lipsian prince who develops this virtue until he rejects all worldly power and accepts his martyrdom. However, a careful examination of the treatment of sensory perception in the play, in particular its use of optical devices, demonstrates how Sor Juana sought to reconcile this promotion of Neostoic morality with a tempered epistemological optimism. Furthermore, an examination of the loa and its connection to the Carta atenagórica and the Respuesta sheds further light on the relationship between this play and the New Philosophy, and Sor Juana’s defence of her own participation in this circulation of new ideas.

This chapter examines the assumptions about the training of the popular imagination that underlie Dickens’s famous account of ‘The Amusements of the People’ in the context of one of the most iconic popular amusements of the mid-Victorian period, Dr Pepper’s Ghost. Pepper’s spectre was advertised as an inspired adaptation of an idea taken from one of Dickens’s The Haunted Man; or the Ghost’s Bargain (1848), on a handbill that made no distinction between mechanical and imaginative attractions. This chapter argues that despite Dickens’s efforts to distinguish the potentially transformative humanising power of popular theatre from the mechanical attractions of the Polytechnics, the assumed automatism that underlies his concept of the imagination as a form of involuntary response was echoed in Pepper’s rationale for introducing imaginative content into the Royal Polytechnic programme when he took over management in the early 1850s.Inspired by the natural magical tradition of David Brewster, Pepper, like Dickens, was committed to defining the habits of his audience; a mutual commitment which positions the literary and technological enterprises of both men within an established philosophical and psychological debate on habit.

This chapter discusses the novelty period of cinema, which began in 1895. It is described as a period when cinema underwent a staggering array of fundamental changes despite having many stable elements. The magic lantern exhibitions featured realistic projected images, and as the years progressed the films began exploiting perspective and a sense of depth. Later on these films introduced a narrative mode, and the actors would look at the camera and acknowledge the audience.

As a symbol of opaque darkness, the mysterious subterranean caves of Elephanta haunted the imagination of writers and painters ranging from John Ruskin to Flaubert and were notably memorialised in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. This chapter examines the recruitment of optical devices like the camera obscura and the magic lantern, aimed at solving the caves’ mysteries, suggesting that these instead exaggerated the ghostly character of the caves, undermining the claims of a rational vision in apprehending their complex iconography and architecture, going on to feed a fantastical visual archive of the caves (and, by extension, the Indian landscape) in German cinema of the early twentieth century.

Chapter 2 describes why delirium tremens became a topic of intense medical interest to American physicians soon after it was first described in 1813. While previously physicians had little interest in treating inebriates, after the delirium tremens diagnosis became widely adopted, drunkards were increasingly put into hospital beds, treated, and studied in a clinical setting. The chapter attributes the widespread adoption of the delirium tremens diagnosis to three main developments. First, the delirium tremens diagnosis derived from developments in American medical education, especially the influence of French physiology and the practice of pathological anatomy. Second, the language and imagery from physicians’ case histories depended on popular romanticism, and especially popular fascination with hallucinations evident in Philadelphia’s popular theater and magic lantern shows. And third, it illustrates how physicians’ case histories linked the disease with concerns about masculine achievement in the context of the profound economic upheaval following the Panic of 1819.

This chapter describes the earliest popular-science films made for the Charles Urban Trading Company by F. Martin Duncan. Duncan’s films were modeled largely on the preexisting format of the magic-lantern lecture. The best known of Duncan’s films were the first series he produced; entitled The Unseen World, it was a series of single-shot films taken through a microscope. The chapter analyzes the extensive press reaction to these films, paying particular attention to Cheese Mites, a film that achieved considerable notoriety. The reception of Cheese Mites provides a case study for how cinema both inherited and transformed previous visual display traditions.