This paper focuses on the function of the magic lantern, a seventeenth-century scientific invention with the ability to project frightening images painted on transparent slides, as a literary device intrinsically connected to the Gothic genre. Darkness, foul weather, animated portraits, eerie apparitions, crumbling abbeys and half-demolished tombs team with physics and optics in an intricate swirl of exchanges between literature and visual technology, still relevant today. These exchanges are vividly illustrated in Girona's spectacular Museu del Cinema – Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol.
FuretièreAntoine.1684. “
Lanterne Magique. ” In Essais d'un dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots François tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les Sciences & des Arts , edited by FuretièreAntoine. n.p.: Gallica. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k506130/f2.item.
2.
HeardMervyn.2006. Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern . Hastings: The Projection Box.
3.
HornerAvril, and ZlosnikSue. 2016. “
Portraits. ” In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic , edited by HughesWilliam, PunterDavid, and SmithAndrew, 507–511. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
4.
HuygensChristiaan.1891. Oeuvres Complètes de Christiaan Huygens. Correspondance 1662-63. Vol. 4 of Oeuvres Completes de Christiaan Huygens . La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff.
5.
JonesDavid J.2011. Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670-1910 . Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
6.
JonesDavid J.2014. Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern: Desire, Eroticism and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker . New York: Palgrave.
7.
MannoniLaurent.2000. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, Edited and Translated by Richard Crangle . Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
8.
MannoniLaurent.2015. “How Many Fantascopes Still Exist?
” The Magic Lantern 5: 10–11.
9.
MarshallJulian.1970. The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley vol. 1. New York: Haskell House Publishers.
10.
MooreThomas, ed. 1830. Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, With Notices of His Life vol. 2. London: John Murray.
11.
Morning Post. 1801. ‘Madame Bonaparte’, August 18.
12.
OttoPeter.2015. “Disoriented, Twice Removed from the Real, Racked by Passion in Walpole's Protean Theatres of Sensation. ” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27 (3): 681–706. doi: 10.3138/ecf.27.3.681.
13.
ParsonsEliza.1794. Lucy 3 vols. London: William Lane.
14.
PonsJordi.2020. “
Experiences from Setting Up the Exhibition ‘Light!’ The Magic Lantern and the Digital Image. Complicity Between the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries. ” In A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slides in the History of Learning , edited by DellmannSarah, and KesslerFrank, 221–226. Herts: John Libbey Publishing.
15.
PonsJordi, and PitarchDaniel. 2017. “History of a Fantascope: A Device for Education in Nineteenth-Century Girona. ” Early Popular Visual Culture 15 (1): 83–99. doi: 10.1080/17460654.2016.1270403.
16.
RobertsonE. G.1831. Mémoires Récréatifs, Scientifiques et Anecdotiques D'un Physicien-Aéronaute vol. 1. Paris: Chez l'auteur.
17.
ShelleyMary.
((1818) 1891. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus . Glasgow: George Routledge and Sons.
18.
ShelleyMary.
((1831) 1891. “
Introduction. ” In Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus , v–xii. Glasgow: George Routledge and Sons.
19.
SteinbergRonen.2019. The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
20.
Tales of the Dead. Principally Translated from the French. 1813. [Translated by Sarah Elizabeth Brown Utterson]. London: White, Cochrane and Co.
21.
Van WoudenbergM.2020. “
Fantasmagoriana: The Cosmopolitan Gothic and Frankenstein. ” In The Cambridge History of the Gothic , edited by TownshendD., and WrightA., 41–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22.
VaraMaria.2019. “
Amongst the Ruins of a European Gothic Pantasmagoria in Athens. ” In Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination , edited by MitsiE., DespotopoulouA., DimakopoulouS., and AretoulakisE., 23–46. New York: Palgrave Macmilan.
23.
VermeirKoen.2005. “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660-1700): On Analogical Demonstration and the Visualization of the Invisible. ” The British Journal for the History of Science 38 (2): 127–159. doi: 10.1017/S0007087405006709.
24.
WalpoleHorace.1784. A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Oxford, at Strawberry-Hill, Near Twickenham, Middlesex . 2nd ed. Twickenham: Strawberry Hill Press.
25.
WalpoleHorace.2008. The Castle of Otranto. A Gothic Story , edited by LewisW. S.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
26.
WestWilliam Edward.1826. “Lord Byron's Last Portrait, With Records of his Conversation, &c. During his Sittings. ” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 16: 243–248.
27.
WoodGillen D'Arcy.2014. Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World . Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
