Cajetan Tschink (22 April 1763 – 26 August 1813) was an Austrian writer, philosopher, and professor whose literary work primarily focused on skepticism of the supernatural.
Aus den Papieren des Mannes mit der eisernen Larve, translated into English by Peter Will as The Victim of Magical Delusion.
[4] Geisterseherroman is characterized by fraudsters and charlatans trick the gullible by using seemingly supernatural means, the machinations of which are revealed to the audience to have mundane explanations through phantasmagoria-style stage effects such as trap doors, hidden mirrors, translucent veils, and pyrotechnics, and through technologies such as the moving panorama, eidophusikon, and magic lantern.
Aus den Papieren des Mannes mit der eisernen Larve, which was translated into English by Peter Will as The Victim of Magical Delusion.
[10] Through The Victim of Magical Delusion, Tschink (as well as Schiller, Kahlert, and Grosse through their novels) was influential to William Godwin, who read Will's English translation, and wrote Lives of the Necromancers.
[12] The preferred intellectual ambience of early American literature favoured Tschink and Schiller over English Gothic writers Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis due to the rational explanations behind supposedly supernatural phenomena.