Phantasmagoria

From dragons and wyverns to vampires, werewolves and mischievous gremlins, pixies and fairies, Breverton's Phantasmagoria is a unique compendium of over 250 mythical animals. Prepare to revisit familiar myths, such as vampires, werewolves and the Loch Ness Monster, the Minotaur and Medusa from Greek legend, and Biblical beasts such as Behemoth and Leviathan. Discover new mysterious animals like the giant serpents of Central America, the lethal Mongolian death worm, and the Ennedi tiger in Africa, and investigate the evidence for sightings of Bigfoot and the reclusive Yeti. Packed with quirky line illustrations and a wealth of weird and wonderful information, Breverton's Phantasmagoria surveys the globe to uncover over 250 imaginary creatures passed down from generation to generation.

With over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria takes readers on an intellectually exhilarating tour of ideas of spirit and soul in the modern world, illuminating key questions of imagination and cognition. Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.

It was on a 'dark and stormy night', during the summer of 1816 that an eccentic group of English literati gathered at the Villa Diodati. The atmosphere at the Villa was charged by the violent streaks of lightening that licked at the mountain tops and split a black sky. As the wind outside whipped up the surface of lake Leman into a cauldron of waves the occupants of the Villa; Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Dr John Polidori, Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont, whipped themselves into a gothic frenzy with recitals of haunting poetry and ghost stories. The stories that they read came from a book, originally written in German, that had recently been translated into French. The book that they read from was called Fantasmagoriana. Fantasmagoriana has a unique place in literary history. This is the first full translation of the stories that inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Dr John Polidori's The Vampyre.

In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

Today, Lewis Carroll is best remembered as a writer of juvenile fiction responsible for such timeless works as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. However, Carroll was also a poet who wove dark visions and supernatural themes into his substantial body of work. Much of the verse collected in Phantasmagoria and Other Poems has a supernatural or visionary theme. A must-read for fans of Victorian ghost stories.

Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny: Nomadism, Technique and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave examines the psychedelic rave music and culture with a focus on the multiday phantasmagoric events organized in mountains, deserts, beaches, and other exotic destinations. Using mobile and multi-sited ethnography, the author follows the routes of a diverse group of Greek EDM and party enthusiasts across the festival map of psychedelic-trance gatherings, including Hungary, Morocco, and Greece, with the aim of investigating the revelatory experience of the chemical psychedelic raving. By situating the rave experience within the phantasmagoria of the festival – a dreamworld par excellence of the alien and the uncanny – the work reformulates questions of ‘liminality’, ‘spirituality’, ‘community’ and ‘identity’ while initiating a discussion about the limits of cosmopolitanism and aesthetics as they are reorganized in the techno-political conditions of the 21st century. In an intense and at times demanding theoretical ‘journey’, the author reframes questions of taste, consumption, altered experience, and lifestyle through the lens of technology or technoaesthetics, speculating on an impending techno-social world of augmented senses and artificial impressions, thus posing questions to the reader about the mediation of social and public events, and the reification of ‘utopian’ paradises in the form of contemporary dreamworlds.

One morning, when Rhythm is spending time with Uncle Gourd, he receives a message from Arch Rotunda, asking him to be back to the world of Electon. As he travels back to Arch in a new kind of vehicle, he makes a new friend, Aofie, who introduces him to deeper secrets of this world of electromagnetic waves—ELECTON. As Rhythm gets embroiled in a new conspiracy planned by Dslots and gets trapped in an unknown imaginary world, Cooper, Olivia, and Eva set out to save Roger (and Electon) before it is too late. The second part of the most-loved series of Rhythm Roger is here for you, with darker secrets roaming around in Electon. In this children’s beloved book, let’s say the magical word together and enter the world of Electon: “AVALONIA.”