Please join Mass Culture this coming Monday afternoon for a special co-presentation with the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Cultures Workshop:
“‘A bright continuous flow’: Magic Lantern Phantasmagoria and Historical Fiction in A Tale of Two Cities”
Amanda Shubert
PhD Student in English, University of Chicago
Monday, February 8th
4:30-6 pm (please note unusual date & time)
Rosenwald 405
This paper addresses the influence of magic lantern phantasmagoria on Charles Dickens’ writing of historical fiction in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Popularized in France by the physicist turned showman Etienne Gaspard Robert, called Robertson, at the tail end of the French Revolution, the phantasmagoria employed a catoptric machine known as a magic lantern to exhibit moving images primarily of ghosts, demons and other Gothic fare. I argue that Dickens drew on the immateriality of phantasmagorical representation, and its concomitant model of forms in a state of transfiguration, to structure his account of historical experience during the French Revolution.
Amanda’s paper is available for download here.
Please email one of the coordinators for the password: taschroeder [at] uchicago.edu or noa [at] uchicago.edu.
**Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Tyler Schroeder at taschroeder [at] uchicago [dot] edu or Noa Merkin at noa [at] gmail [dot] com**