The Secret Life of Puppets Book

I read the first 99 pages of this book when I bought it in 2001, then shelved it and forgot it. Recently I've been reading Puppet by Kenneth Gross, and decided to read it again. I'm glad I did: it's fascinating look at the emergence of the grotesque and the concomitant disappearance of the transcendent in Western consciousness, or more accurately, its displacement into the "fantastic" literature of Kleist, Poe and their successors as well as the mass-art media of horror-fantasy films, fiction, graphic novels and games. In broadest terms, Nelson investigates the evolution of the numinous from religion into art, the inner tensions of an unstable materialist worldview.

The journey, fortunately, is far more interesting than my congested summary. Nelson's Secret Life is one of my favorite kinds of books - a history of Imagination; an eccentric, deeply intelligent meditation on the forms of art and consciousness, packed with specific examples and excurses, as well as sweeping statements such as "This drastic reinterpretation of reality [around, roughly, the Reformation] in which one's only transcendental link to God is internal marks the real dividing line in Western culture." It's the sort of book in which one enjoys the ruminating endnotes as much as the text itself.

If you're the type of reader who enjoys the historical analyses of writers like Ioan Couliano; C S Lewis (literary criticism, not apologetics); Frances Yates; Owen Barfield; James Hillman; Roberto Calasso - you'd probably enjoy Nelson. She has a new book (Gothika) coming out this spring; I've already ordered it.