Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing

Description

This book offers an innovative reassessment of the way Victorians thought and wrote about visual experience. It argues that new visual technologies gave expression to new ways of seeing, using these to uncover the visual discourses that facilitated, informed and shaped the way people conceptualised and articulated visual experience. In doing so, the book reconsiders literary and non-fiction works by well-known authors including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, G.H. Lewes, Max Nordau, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph Conrad, as well as shedding light on less-known works drawn from the periodical press. By revealing the discourses that formed around visual technologies, the book challenges and builds upon existing scholarship to provide a powerful new model by which to understand how the Victorians experienced, conceptualised, and wrote about vision. Front Matter ....Pages i-x Introduction (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 1-19 The Panorama and Simultaneity: The Panoramic Desire to See Everything At Once (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 21-46 “Lost in Air”: The Magic Lantern and Visual Experiences of Balloons and Dreams (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 47-67 The Dissolving View and the Historical Imagination (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 69-107 Visions of Thought: Mid-century Science and Visual Knowledge (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 109-144 “Hocus Focus”: The Stereoscope and Photography (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 145-182 The Networked World: The Psychopathology of Simultaneity (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 183-212 The Web of Realities in H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad: A Fractal Episteme (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 213-234 Conclusion. The Technological Imagination II: The Start of the Twentieth Century (Jonathan Potter)....Pages 235-243 Back Matter ....Pages 245-269