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Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction
Magic, and especially performance magic, has been a part of crime fiction since its inception: both art forms surged in popularity in Western Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and influenced each other in profound ways. This collection of essays provides an in-depth look at this phenomenon and covers a variety of writers, across multiple languages, cultures, and traditions as well as multiple subgenres (Victorian autobiography, classic detective tales, pulp fiction, fantasy mystery, etc.). From historical studies examining the rise in popularity of magician narratives in mystery and detective fiction, to essays documenting the number of professional magicians who double as crime fiction writers, to theoretical studies analyzing the narrative and functional overlap between illusion, prestidigitation, and literary criminals and detectives, this collection of essays provides readers with a range of perspectives and approaches from a variety of scholarly backgrounds.
Performing Dark Arts
Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality. It brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by examining it in the context of performance studies, and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts in which their performances were received, and the meanings which they have attracted.
