Professor Marina Warner FBA (University of Essex) in conversation with Professor Hermione Lee FBA (University of Oxford)

Wednesday 11 May 2011, 6.00pm
The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
as part of the British Academy's 2011 Literature Week

This ‘in conversation’ event takes as its starting point Marina Warner’s book Phantasmagoria, which she discusses with Hermione Lee. Reviewing it in 2006, Hilary Mantel described it as an exploration of: “the words we find for the things that aren’t quite there... the ways that the dead live: on film, in wax, in those Victorian spirit photographs, so clumsy that nowadays they wouldn’t fool a child. It takes us from Dante to JK Rowling, Peter Pan to Jean-Paul Marat, Aristotle to Magritte. It is about fog and smog and celestial clouds, doppelgängers and vampires, magic lanterns and Rorschach blots...” They explore these technologies of the invisible and their presence in fairy tale and magical literature.

Phantasmagoria

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