Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian Literature (Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures) - Softcover

Christopher Pittard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1474460348 ISBN 13: 9781474460347

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Explores the dialogue between Victorian literature and one of the nineteenth century’s most popular modes of performance: conjuring

• Reads Victorian novels alongside an under-studied field of conjuring and performance manuals and biographies
• Explores and theorises an underexplored aspect of Dickens’ career (as an amateur magician), connecting this to his later public readings
• Combines analysis of canonical texts with less frequently criticised Victorian bestsellers
• Brings performance history into dialogue with literary criticism and theories of intellectual property

Literary Illusions explores the dialogue between Victorian literature and one of the nineteenth century’s most popular modes of performance: conjuring. It explores the ways in which Victorian literature frequently deployed the figure of the magician to explore performance magic as a metaphor for writing itself, and the ways in which conjurors themselves were authors (of highly fictionalised biographies), while authors explored the narrative opportunities offered by magic (most notably Charles Dickens). The book theorises magic as a manifestation of Victorian concerns with authorship and the intellectual property debate, with the magician often deployed as a privileged – and occasionally parodied – figure in debates on textuality. Literary Illusions offers a reconceptualisation of the relationship between popular culture and literature in the nineteenth century, bringing canonical figures such as Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell into dialogue with lesser known Victorian bestsellers such as Henry Cockton and Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, and innovatively blends performance history with literary criticism.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, specialising in Victorian literature. His books include a new critical edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (2023), The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (2019), and Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011). He has published numerous articles on Victorian culture in journals including Studies in the Novel, 19; Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Victorian Periodicals Review, Clues: A Journal of Detection, and Women: A Cultural Review.

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474460348
• ISBN 13: 9781474460347
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240