Abstract
In his travel memoir Pictures from Italy (1846), Charles Dickens turned to the analogy of the magic lantern to describe the way his mind mediated the beauty and spectacle of the landscape. He observed the ‘rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that had passed before me’, noting that ‘[a]t intervals, some one among them would stop’ to allow his mind to focus on the image for a moment before ‘it would dissolve, like a view in a magic lantern’ (1846, p. 107). Decades later, Proust’s narrator in the opening sections of Swann’s Way in Remembrance of Things Past (1913) wrote of the magic lantern images of Golo from the medieval legend of Genevieve of Brabant, ‘advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds’:
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Groth, H. (2016). Mediating Popular Fictions: From the Magic Lantern to the Cinematograph. In: Gelder, K. (eds) New Directions in Popular Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52346-4_14
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