The Victorians and the Visual Imagination

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Kate Flint (Author)

9780521089524, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 November 2008

444 pages, 71 b/w illus.
24.4 x 17 x 2.3 cm, 0.7 kg

Review of the hardback: 'This book is a quite magnificent contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, as well as to the wider exploration of the cultural production of the senses. Flint moves with restless, virtuosic authority between literature, painting, politics and scientific writing, layering together gripping new material with reangled readings of familiar texts.' Steven Connor, Birkbeck College, University of London

The Victorians and the Visual Imagination is an exciting and innovative exploration of the Victorians' attitudes towards sight. Tantalized by physiologists who proved the unreliability of the eye, intrigued by the role of subjectivity within vision, and provoked by new technologies of spectatorship, the Victorians were also imaginatively stirred by the sense of a world which lay just out of human sight. This interdisciplinary study draws on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as Pre-Raphaelite and realist painters including Millais, Burne-Jones, William Powell Frith and Whistler, and a host of Victorian scientists, cultural commentators and art critics. Its topics include blindness, the location of memory, hallucination, dust, and the importance of the horizon - a dazzling eclectic range of subjects linked together by the operations of the eye and brain.

1. The visible and the unseen
2. 'The mote within the eye'
3. Blindness and insight
4. Lifting the veil
5. Under the ice
6. The buried city
7. The role of the art critic
8. Criticism, language and narrative
9. Surface and depth
10. Hallucination and vision
Conclusion: the Victorian horizon.

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