Michael Saler. As If

In his previous works Michael Saler has questioned the simplistic characterization of modernity as an age of secularism, positivism, and scientism by exploring the subjects of medieval modernism and secular magic. In his latest book, As If, he continues the project through an insightful and entertaining analysis of modern enchantment, specifically on the topic of fictional worlds that took on lives of their own in the imagination of their consumers. As Saler asserts in the first sentence of the book: “The modern West has been called ‘disenchanted,’ but that is a half-truth” (p. 3). We are familiar with enthusiasts of Star Trek, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter forming magazine-based and online communities, writing fan fiction, and gathering in conventions dressed as characters in the stories. Saler shows that this phenomenon of creating “virtual reality” to celebrate and participate in fictional worlds began in the late nineteenth century, as a way of bringing enchantment back to a disenchanted world. The first two chapters of the book provide a succinct historical context of this development, particularly on the subjects of the various ways in which sections of modernist culture reacted against the secularizing and positivist tendency in the fin-de-siècle period, the growing intellectual recognition of the importance of the faculty of the imagination in exploring reality, and the rise and enormous popularity of New Romance literature. The subsequent three chapters deal in detail with the cases of Arthur Conan Doyle's world of Sherlock Holmes, H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth narratives.

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