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.