Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites

by Lindsay Smith

Overview

This book explores the intersections between Victorian literature, painting and photography. Taking as a starting point mid-nineteenth-century developments in the understanding of visual perception, Lindsay Smith examines the representation of a pervasive desire for a literal understanding of the process of seeing and perceiving. This is played out in the aesthetic theory of John Ruskin, the early poetry of William Morris, paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, and in the photographic technique of combination printing. She demonstrates how the novel presence of the camera in nineteenth-century culture not only transforms acts of looking, but also affects major social, aesthetic and philosophical categories. By exploring the intricacies of photographic discourse she shows how Ruskin and Morris produce a critique of the earlier Cartesian perspectival model of vision.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521054683
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/28/2008
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #6
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Lindsay Smith's love of Russian culture has taken her to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a reindeer festival in the middle of Siberia. She writes on foreign affairs and lives in Washington, D.C. Sekret is her first novel.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Ruskin, Morris and the (un)assertive eyes; 2. 'Gaps on the mind's shelves': Ruskin's theory of the grotesque; 3. 'The seed of the flower': photography and Pre-Raphaelitism; 4. 'Where he cannot see, he will not venture far': the critical reception of The Defence of Guenevere; 5. The optical agency of 'Rapunzel'; 6. The politics of sight: The Defence of Guenevere and the optical determinants of medieval topography; 7. Coda: through yellow lenses; Notes; Bibliography; Index.