Novelist, critic and cultural historian Marina Warner talks to Matthew Sweet about a life spent in the company of magic, myths and monsters.
Marina Warner
Photograph by Elke Bock.
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In Night Waves tonight Matthew Sweet will be talking to Marina Warner – one of Britain’s most omnivorous and original thinkers.
Over the last thirty years she has dissected some of the governing myths of our age, from the Virgin Mary to zombies.
Her Reith Lectures in 1994, ‘Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time’, for which she is perhaps best known, traced the roots of such contemporary demons as bad mothers and wild children in a vast range of sources, from fairytales through religious iconography to computer games.
After growing up in Cairo - until when her father’s bookshop was burned down in nationalist riots - and a convent in Ascot, Marina Warner made her way via Oxford and Vogue magazine to become one of our most exploratory feminist writers.
From excavating the stories and assumptions underlying such female icons as the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc and Margaret Thatcher, she has more recently turned her attention to the anxieties surrounding our sense of self.
In her new book, Phantasmagoria, she explores how, far from eliminating our visions of spirits, scientific developments from cosmetic surgery and cinema to CCTV and the internet have intensified our sense of invisible and uncanny forces impinging on our world.
But how much does her rational exploration of the irrational owe to her Catholic upbringing? How does her work on the self apply to Marina Warner herself? And how far can her work really lead to advances in how we live?
Matthew Sweet interviews Marina Warner, tonight on Night Waves.
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media by Marina Warner is published by Oxford University Press.
