Description
Performing Magic on the Western Stage examines magic as a performing art and as a meaningful social practice, linking magic to cultural arenas such as religion, finance, gender, and nationality and profiling magicians from Robert-Houdin to Penn & Teller.
Table of Contents:
- Life magic and staged magic: a hidden intertwining / Lawrence Hass
- The family romance of modern magic: contesting Robert-Houdin’s cultural legacy in contemporary France / Graham M. Jones
- Magicians and the magic of Hollywood cinema during the 1920s / Matthew Solomon
- The body immaterial: magicians’ assistants and the performance of labor / Francesca Coppa
- Conjuring capital: magic and finance from eighteenth-century London to the new Las Vegas / James Peck
- The sacred and the sleight of hand in American Indian gaming / Mary Lawlor
- Outdoing Ching Ling Foo / Christopher Stahl
- Intersecting illusions: performing magic, disability, and gender / Karen Dearborn
- Through a glass darkly: magic and religion in Western thought and practice / Susan L. Schwartz
- Illusions about illusions / Robert E. Neale.
