Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

An illustrated study of the interactions between photographic technique and literary representation in the nineteenth century.

Daniel A. Novak (Author)

9780521885256, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 May 2008

252 pages, 42 b/w illus.
25.4 x 17.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.66 kg

'Novak's … achievement is to highlight a neglected vein of nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, one that makes sense of some of the most important yet eccentric masterpieces of the era and positions them crucially as an alternative approach to the question of realism.' Novel: A Forum on Fiction

This fascinating account of the relationship between photography and literary realism in Victorian Britain draws on detailed readings of photographs, writings about photography, and fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. While other critics have argued that photography defined what would be 'real' for literary fiction, Daniel A. Novak demonstrates that photography itself was associated with the unreal - with fiction and the literary imagination. Once we acknowledge that manipulation was essential rather than incidental to the project of nineteenth-century realism, our understanding of the relationship between photography and fiction changes in important ways. Novak argues that while realism may seem to make claims to particularity and individuality, both in fiction and in photography, it relies much more on typicality than on perfect reproduction. Illustrated with many photographs, this book represents an important contribution to current debates on the nature of Victorian realism.

Introduction: 'detestable introductions'
1. Missing persons and model bodies: Victorian photographic figures
2. Composing the novel body: re-membering the body and the text in Little Dorrit
3. A model Jew: 'literary photography' and the Jewish body in Daniel Deronda
4. Sexuality in the age of technological reproducibility: Wilde, identity, and photography
After-image: surviving the photograph
Select bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]