Modern Enchantments

“A history of “secular,” or non-supernatural, or entertainment magic as an important but neglected constituent of modern culture” (Nicholas Daly).

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.

Praise for ModernEnchantment

“During documents the extent to which magic and magical thinking have pervaded, and continue to pervade, secular life . . . the author examines 19th- and 20th-century theatrical magic and “commercial conjuring” with great sensitivity to the social and cultural context in the Western world. Equally fascinating is the analysis of magic and early film.” —R. Sugarman, Choice

“A richly informed, warmly argued addition to the growing number of books in which writers worry at the pervasive blurring of distinctions between act and appearance, organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, imagination and empirical experience, illusion and thought, reality TV and real life, dreams and money.” —Marina Warner, Financial Times

“During moves confidently across three centuries of magic (and covers aspects of a few more besides). The sheer wealth of historical detail he provides is impressive, but no less impressive is the subtlety of his argumentation, and the suggestiveness of his claims . . . This extremely significant piece of work will appeal to literary critics, historians, and not least, devotees of magic.” —Nicholas Daly, author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914