Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic
Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people?

Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.

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Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic
Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people?

Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.

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Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic

Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic

by Simon During
Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic

Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic

by Simon During

Paperback(New Edition)

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Overview

Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people?

Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674013711
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 03/01/2004
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 352
Product dimensions: 5.75(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Simon During is Australian Research Professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Magic History: An Introduction

2. Enchantment and Loss: Theorizing Secular Magic

3. Egg-Bag Tricks and Electricity: The Founding of Modern Commercial Conjuring

4. Magic's Moment: The Illusion Business

5. From Magic to Film

6. Magic and Literature

7. Magic Places: The Lyceum and the Great Room, Spring Gardens

8. Spiritualism and the Birth of Optical Technologies

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

The first major academic work on secular magic - magic that makes no claim to the supernatural. The historical research is outstanding, while presented in an entertaining, indeed quite charming, manner. Yet Modern Enchantments is not only a pleasurable account of perhaps forgotten histories...During uses secular magics and their audiences to profoundly problematise assumptions that general culture does not have a plurality of modes of engaging with quite sophisticated nihilisms, materialisms, depths and depthlessnesses of a non-spiritual kind. . .

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