Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphor, and Media into the Twenty-First Century by Marina Warner

This book investigates representations of the spirit and the supernatural, starting early but really hitting its stride around the early eighteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. It considers representations of the self and a spiritual presence in material (wax, cloud, photographs, film) and immaterial (ether, air, ectoplasm) forms. The book casts a wide-ranging net to gather its evidence--we see examples drawn from art, literature, material culture, and many other places. Generally it argues that despite our increasing understanding of the processes in the world and our increasing secularization, we still need, perhaps more than ever, representations of spirit. I thought the last chapter, on zombies, was particularly effective. The book had a refreshing tone--it treats moments of spiritualism (like knocking, expulsion of ectoplasm, etc.) as moments to be studied for their interpretative value, not as phenomena to be definitively proven or disproven.