Traditionally there has been much cheap sniping at Italy’s strategic planning in 1915: unduly ambitious, naïve, megalomaniacal. Staff plans for warfare were undeniably disconcerting. The prime peculiarity was a lack of precise planning or analysis. In the first draft of plans for war against Austria-Hungary, a mere 8-page summary that Cadorna presented in August 1914, the strategic objectives of the future campaign were sketchily alluded to; there was no trace of any precise schedule. In other respects, Cadorna was much more acute. He rightly predicted a long and expensive war and did his utmost to persuade ministers to mobilize Italian industry forthwith and bring it under state control. His intuitions were frustrated, however, by the civilians’ total aloofness from military matters. Never as in the period of Italy’s neutrality was the absence of a coordination mechanism between politicians and generals felt so disastrously. Roberto Bencivenga, at that time already attached to Cadorna’s secretariat, eloquently testified to the lack of any collaboration between cabinet and army Staff. Worse, the top military brass were deliberately kept in the dark about political decisions.

The term lyric conjures many different things: musical language, emotional intensity, the qualities of ritual or prayer, introspection, and interiority. It has also come to designate a wide variety of spoken, sung, and printed poetic forms. This chapter explores Shelley’s relations to these ideas and forms through his reading and his writing. It also places Shelley’s writing in the context of modern and contemporary lyric theory, which investigates and expands the meaning of the term lyric and puts useful pressure on assumptions we might have about poetic voice, subjects, or speakers. In bringing these various contexts together, I suggest that none of them can wholly determine Shelleyan lyric, which is by turns formally constrained and politically engaged, intimate and impersonal.

This chapter examines the boundary-breaking spatial and social dynamism of animalian entities embodied within LB I–LB II polychrome murals of Crete and Thera. In these innovative paintings, animalian entities engaged with both painted and lived contexts, taking on novel manners of involvement in Aegean sociocultural spaces; some established new aspects of creaturely identity and relation. We begin with three animalian entities considered – boar’s tusk helmets, ox-hide shields and ikria – examining how their presence in murals further challenged long-standing parameters of two-dimensional representation. Here discussion broadens to consider how renderings of various animals in Minoan frescoes charged and unsettled the fabric of powerful built spaces. Innovations in color, scale and the creation of spatial depth approached the ways animalian bodies were experienced in the round. Simultaneously, details of the frescoes kept the painted creatures, and the spaces they occupied, tautly embroiled in the structured order of the wall. We close by considering how polychrome frescoes could foster radical newness in animals’ identities, focusing on renderings of blue simians. This blueness, regardless of whether originally intended to approximate biological hues, engendered distinct status for simians in the Aegean, with fascinating connections to renderings of young peoples.

“Metatheatre,” the term coined by Lionel Abel, flourished in the baroque (roughly 1550–1650) and modernist (or neobaroque, twentieth century) in Europe and the United States. Rather than representing the illusion of reality, it represents the reality of illusion. Pirandello’s Henry IV may be read as a modernist rendering of Hamlet. More radically than Hamlet, “Henry” perceives the impossibility of grasping truth beneath appearances and chooses to live in theatrical play forever. This chapter compares Six Characters in Search of an Author to an untitled play by the baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Both feature characters angry at their author and discussion of a play to be made. In each, the “fourth wall” is removed to reveal theatre-in-process. Instead of portraying theatre as an imitation of life, metatheatre reveals life’s inherent theatricality.

The second chapter focuses on the tale of Calandrino and the heliotrope (8.3). It asks two primary questions: why does Calandrino need to be a real historical person and what is the role of the custom agents in the tale? The answers to these questions are related because Boccaccio’s documentary style turns the pranks against Calandrino into a form of community policing. The shaming of Calandrino is a group effort and a public spectacle, a form of pittura infamante. In a justice system in which art could function as social conditioning by making citizens feel continually seen, it makes all the difference whether the person depicted can be identified. The tale of Calandrino and the heliotrope is justly celebrated as a masterful reflection on art and illusion. This chapter illustrates the political nature of this reflection. Namely, is Calandrino simply a bad friend—or is he also a bad citizen? Contemporary readers would thus have understood the real threat posed by Calandrino’s illegal—and supposedly undetected—border crossing when he passes through the gates without paying the custom agents. At stake is why we should obey the law when there is no one around to see.

In the nineteenth century, visual culture became noted for spectacles such as panoramas, which sought to create an experience that offered more than simply viewing an engraving or a framed painting. The panorama placed the spectator at the centre of a circle, surrounded by a huge painting on a curved surface. This chapter focuses on the Arctic panorama Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (1850) that opened in London in 1850. The chapter explains how a radically transformed Arctic was presented to a metropolitan audience, which anticipated education, entertainment, and an aesthetic experience at Leicester Square, London. Summer and Winter Views was based on the drawings of a recently returned officer, William Henry Browne, and made claims of authenticity in a competitive market. By closely reading the sources available for the panorama, including sketches, contemporary reviews, and prints, it argues that this affordable and persuasive spectacle of ‘savage horrors’ transformed the Arctic into a supernatural space of well-executed, yet sensationalistic, Gothic icescapes, masculine endeavour, and exotic meteorological effects.

This chapter analyzes traditions of staging the plays from the beginning of the twentieth century, spanning a period from the Boer Wars until the postcolonial wars of the present. It considers not only ways of depicting fighting and battles, but also perspectives on the morality of war created by Shakespeare and his directors. During this period, post-Victorian pictorial realism and historical “accuracy” survived in cinema, but in the theater they gave way to non-illusionistic and unlocalized sets as companies turned their attention from “history” to politics. This did not mean that spectacle diminished: shocking savagery and violence could be graphically represented, but pageants of royal and aristocratic grandeur along with appeals to patriotism sustained by providence were set against vignettes of common life – no longer “comic relief” but ironic touchstones that detected processes of chauvinism, huffing rhetoric, and heroic posturing as families, factions, and nations tore themselves apart.

Dreams provided Bishop with a creative resource, a motif, a model, and a literary device in her work, exceeding the contexts of surrealism, psychoanalysis and autobiography in which they have been discussed. While the word “dream” and its variants turn up repeatedly in Bishop’s work, her usage and attitude vary. I argue that dreams in Bishop might best be understood within a literary/aesthetic or cognitive/phenomenological lens. Furthermore, symbolist practices are as pertinent to Bishop’s dream poetry as surrealist practices. This essay explores the nature of “dreaming” in Bishop as a poetic resource, a phenomenal experience and paradigm of imaginative activity. And, quite differently, I acknowledge Bishop’s ambivalence about dreams as a literary device and, more broadly, as a general pursuit of illusions with often precarious personal and social implications.

The brain strives to become a model of the world in which it must survive. It is often more important for it to be functional and efficient than it is to be factually correct. Indeed, there are numerous instances in which it seems to favour usefulness over accuracy, expectation over actuality. This has led many to conclude that even normal perception has a constructive or hallucinatory quality. In extremis, under the influence of fatigue, fear, illness or drugs, an entire reality may be created, one that seems to conflict with the reality accepted by those around us. This condition, known as psychosis, offers us important glimpses into the mechanisms of the mind and the many ways in which they may be altered.

Against those who say that the ancient world never developed a theory of fiction, the chapter argues that a concept of fiction is operative already in Homer and is articulated in Aristotle’s Poetics, and explores the relationship between ancient and modern theories of what kind of assent audiences and readers give to what they are reading or seeing on the stage.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Hegelian background to Marx’s thought and then attempts to situate him in the radical German emigration in Paris, Brussels and London, between 1843 and 1850. Until the summer of 1850, Marx continued to believe that a working-class uprising in France would provoke a revolutionary upheaval that would engulf Europe. In Class Struggles and The 18th Brumaire, Marx draws lessons for the German working class from the defeats of the French proletariat between 1848 and 1851. He does so by systematically contrasting the world of historical reality, the class struggle, and the realm of shadow and illusion in which historical actors fancy that their speeches and parliamentary manoeuvres make a difference. He explains brilliantly how Louis-Napoleon could have appeared as a saviour to the impoverished small peasantry. What is most striking about these essays is their rhetorical power – the literary skill with which Marx evokes the ghosts and shadows, the dreams, riddles and masquerades that constitute the realm of ideology and illusion. Marx’s essays on 1848–1851 give substance to his theories of ideology and false consciousness and do so in a way that fuses the spellbinding power of the imagery with the spell-banishing power of the historian.

Chapter 1 discusses the structure of ideology in capitalism. According to Adorno, ideology is a “socially necessary illusion” that is embodied in the legal, social, and political institutions constitutive of capitalism. Using Hegel’s category of “semblance” (Schein) in the logic of essence, I argue that although individuals take themselves to be free and equal in capitalism, such moral intuitions are in fact grounded on, and therefore conceal, the deeper relation of domination. Finally, I discuss Marx’s account of the objectivity of the ideology of equality and freedom in capitalism. In contrast to slave or feudal societies, where there was no claim to equality and freedom, domination by capital is mediated by the institution of wage-labor, which requires equality and freedom.

In the philosophy of dreaming, it is common to assume that dreams fall into one of two categories, which are thought to be mutually exclusive: Either they are quasi-perceptual phenomena, which is typically taken to imply they are hallucinations, or they are imaginative experiences. In this chapter, I propose that describing dreams as immersive mental simulations can help overcome this dichotomy, illuminating how dreams are both perception-like and deeply imaginative. Like standard waking experiences, dreams are here-and-now experiences of a virtual world centered on a virtual self. Like imagination, they are driven by spontaneous processes, marking a deep commonality with mental simulation in wakefulness, including mind-wandering and daydreaming. The sources of dreaming are similarly broad, spanning short- and long-term memories, ongoing concerns, and emotions, as well as illusory own-body perception during sleep. Understanding the commonalities between dreaming, perceiving and imagining without collapsing dreams into either category can enrich our understanding of our mental lives and forge new connections between philosophy and contemporary research on sleeping, dreaming, and mind-wandering.

Chapter 1 argues that Victorian studies of animal mimicry and camouflage (known collectively as crypsis) resisted the hardening dichotomy between science and the arts. Researchers drew on their subjective perceptions, and art theories and techniques, to represent crypsis and recreate its illusions for readers. The first theorisers of ‘protective mimicry’, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, laced their writings with personal anecdotes of being deceived by animals’ appearances. Such narratives substituted for the imagined experiences of these animals’ predators and prey. It is proposed that these texts followed a pattern of perceptual self-scrutiny and suspended judgement that had been articulated by the art critic John Ruskin. Bates, Wallace and, even more, the Oxford zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton also sought to simulate experiences of crypsis through illustrations. Accompanying text guided readers through the trompe l'oeil much as Ruskin’s ekphrastic prose guided the consumption of paintings. The tension between such artistic science and the rising ideal of objectivity came to a head in the controversial work of the American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Although Thayer made some lasting contributions to crypsis studies, his approach to nature as an artwork that only artists could understand provoked strong attacks from some zoologists.

In 4.6, Edgar, who pretends to be Poor Tom, guides his blind father Gloucester towards Dover. Gloucester has asked to be led to the top of a cliff so that he can end his days. But the cliff is only an illusion created verbally by Edgar who wants to protect his father’s life. This scene uses the power of the Elizabethan stage to become a moment of pure theatre, calling for a bare stage to retain all its ambiguities. The aim of this contribution is to show how cinema and television can sometimes maintain, and even foster, the scene’s paradoxes of a non-space. The chapter interrogates the possibilities offered by the screen to reflect the complex dramatic and metadramatic tensions in several film productions of King Lear that use Shakespeare’s playtext. These screen productions, emerging from different media and production contexts, all present different strategies to represent the ‘cliff’ scene. From Richard Eyre’s 1998 film, to films made for television and video release, to feature films (Peter Brook’s in 1971), they all attempt, through textual cuts, framing and/or editing, to circumvent the problem posed by a scene that seems to encapsulate the very essence of the bare Elizabethan stage.

What if the consistency of the Goddess’s account of the cosmic order according to the opinions of mortals, in the second part of Parmenides’ poem, was the very sign of its own deceitful character? This chapter attempts to show that Parmenides’ use of the terms kosmos and diakosmos refers to the use of these terms and their cognates in epic poetry and that this source is the best one for us to reconstruct the missing steps of the Doxa part of the poem. Parmenides transposes the Homeric vocabulary of dividing and ordering troops, arranging collective occupations, into the field of cosmology in order to illustrate how the words of men are swift to order a beautiful representation of the universe. Parmenides’ goddess delivers the most complete cosmogony and cosmology of the Archaic world, while also stating that it is merely words. The shaping and ordering of the universe are an arrangement of words, given all power to build a world by their own means. They are all the more consistent as they are demiurgical and deceitful.