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The Uses and Abuses of Illusion
For all his idiosyncrasies, Palmer was emblematic of this cultural turn to Fictionalism, the adoption of an “as if” orientation to secure enchantment in a rational, secular age....
Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012) and The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: 'Medieval Modernism' and the London Underground (Oxford, 1999).