Viewing the Victorians: Recent Research on Victorian Visuality

Abstract

Since carol christ's pioneering research in 1975 on the “finer optic” of Victorian poetry, the optic has become even finer in all senses of the word: refined, particular, precise, scientific, and, most importantly, thoroughly historical and material. The optical is no longer a metaphor, but a reality: a device, apparatus, or gadget whose lens-crafted appearance on the scene of vision enhances and alters “visuality,” a recently coined term for “how we moderns see seeing.” Terms which once stood solely upon metaphorical ground, as in W. D. Shaw's “The Optical Metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of Knowledge” (Victorian Studies, 1980), now refer to concrete practices, scientific optically monitored experiments, and lens and mirror evidentiary and entertainment venues that shaped internal and external life as “modern” during Queen Victoria's reign. In fact, her reign from 1837 until 1901 exactly corresponds with the era that saw the invention and gradual institutionalization of photo- and cinematographic techniques of imaging.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.