Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Author: Jonathan Potter

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-22

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 3319897373

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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.


Book Synopsis Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain by : Jonathan Potter

Download or read book Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain written by Jonathan Potter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-22 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Techniques of the Observer

Techniques of the Observer

Author: Jonathan Crary

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1992-02-25

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9780262531078

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Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.


Book Synopsis Techniques of the Observer by : Jonathan Crary

Download or read book Techniques of the Observer written by Jonathan Crary and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992-02-25 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Author: Sibylle Baumbach

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-11-20

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3030753972

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This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces. This is an open access book.


Book Synopsis Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by : Sibylle Baumbach

Download or read book Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture written by Sibylle Baumbach and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-20 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces in their manifold manifestations. In so doing, it examines various cultural products ‘as they are’ and highlights the art of surface composition in the Victorian era as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the preoccupation with the exterior. By closely reading the various surfaces materialising in Victorian literature and culture, the individual contributions explore the dialectics of surface and depth in Victorian (and Neo-Victorian) cultures as well as the legibility of surfaces. They look into the surfaces of literary narratives, paintings, and film but also into natural surfaces such as skin or bark. Each chapter foregrounds what is present rather than absent in a text, while also paying attention to the surfaces that become manifest on the diegetic level of the text, be they cloth, landscapes, or human bodies or faces. This is an open access book.

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Author: Janis McLarren Caldwell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-11-18

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1139456644

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Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.


Book Synopsis Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain by : Janis McLarren Caldwell

Download or read book Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain written by Janis McLarren Caldwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-18 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.

Writing Lives Together

Writing Lives Together

Author: Felicity James

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-27

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1351393065

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A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of ‘writing lives together’: British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736–1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.


Book Synopsis Writing Lives Together by : Felicity James

Download or read book Writing Lives Together written by Felicity James and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-27 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of ‘writing lives together’: British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736–1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Environmental Issues in Political Discourse in Britain and Ireland

Environmental Issues in Political Discourse in Britain and Ireland

Author: Gilles Leydier

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2013-09-17

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 144385283X

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This book examines the political response to current environmental concerns in the context of the British Isles. How have the issues been assimilated by political parties? Which ones have been given priority? Who are the main actors and what is the role of ecologists? Answers to questions such as these are provided in this collective work, not only through valuable insights into the theories and concepts found in political ecology, but also with specific examination of present political debates, such as the Liberal Democrats’ stance, the question of nuclear energy or the salient issue of climate change. A recurring theme is the link between landscape and identity, explored in the contexts of Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalisms. While this volume reveals some cases of genuine commitment and effective action, it also highlights discrepancies between statements of intent on the one hand and implemented policies on the other. The authors’ aim is to promote dialogue among politicians, experts and academics in the field of environmental issues, political and social sciences, linguistics and discourse.


Book Synopsis Environmental Issues in Political Discourse in Britain and Ireland by : Gilles Leydier

Download or read book Environmental Issues in Political Discourse in Britain and Ireland written by Gilles Leydier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the political response to current environmental concerns in the context of the British Isles. How have the issues been assimilated by political parties? Which ones have been given priority? Who are the main actors and what is the role of ecologists? Answers to questions such as these are provided in this collective work, not only through valuable insights into the theories and concepts found in political ecology, but also with specific examination of present political debates, such as the Liberal Democrats’ stance, the question of nuclear energy or the salient issue of climate change. A recurring theme is the link between landscape and identity, explored in the contexts of Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalisms. While this volume reveals some cases of genuine commitment and effective action, it also highlights discrepancies between statements of intent on the one hand and implemented policies on the other. The authors’ aim is to promote dialogue among politicians, experts and academics in the field of environmental issues, political and social sciences, linguistics and discourse.

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Author: Winter Jade Werner

Publisher:

Published: 2023-05-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780814255889

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Examines the missionary roots of cosmopolitanism through Romantic and Victorian literature, revealing the interconnectedness between evangelically motivated imperialisms and secularized cosmopolitanism.


Book Synopsis Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by : Winter Jade Werner

Download or read book Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature written by Winter Jade Werner and published by . This book was released on 2023-05-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the missionary roots of cosmopolitanism through Romantic and Victorian literature, revealing the interconnectedness between evangelically motivated imperialisms and secularized cosmopolitanism.

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy

Author: Donna V. Jones

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0231145489

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In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.


Book Synopsis The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy by : Donna V. Jones

Download or read book The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy written by Donna V. Jones and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.

Chaos and Cosmos

Chaos and Cosmos

Author: Heidi C. M. Scott

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-01-14

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0271065362

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In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.


Book Synopsis Chaos and Cosmos by : Heidi C. M. Scott

Download or read book Chaos and Cosmos written by Heidi C. M. Scott and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

The Victorian Pulpit

The Victorian Pulpit

Author: Robert H. Ellison

Publisher: Susquehanna University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9781575910147

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The Victorian Pulpit is the first book to employ the methods of orality-literacy scholarship in the study of the nineteenth-century British sermon. The first chapters present three ways in which Victorian preaching was a conflation of oral and written practice. The second part is an analysis of the rhetoric of three prominent ministers. The book concludes by suggesting other ways of bringing orality-literacy studies and Victorian scholarship together.


Book Synopsis The Victorian Pulpit by : Robert H. Ellison

Download or read book The Victorian Pulpit written by Robert H. Ellison and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian Pulpit is the first book to employ the methods of orality-literacy scholarship in the study of the nineteenth-century British sermon. The first chapters present three ways in which Victorian preaching was a conflation of oral and written practice. The second part is an analysis of the rhetoric of three prominent ministers. The book concludes by suggesting other ways of bringing orality-literacy studies and Victorian scholarship together.