Abstract
This book conceptualises visual and literary cultures as a pluralism of discourses. Not only might these discourses fluctuate and shift from one instance to another but their adaptability creates space for individual agency. Discourses of vision are examined here through media technologies such as the panorama, the magic lantern, the stereoscope, and the kaleidoscope, amongst others. This introduction interrogates the idea of a “technological imagination” through works by Lewis Carroll, Jacob Bigelow, Richard Horne, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Some scholars have remained sceptical about paradigms and models for vision. In 1997, for instance, Kevin Z. Moore reviewed the literature on Victorian visual culture to argue: “there was no coherent politics of vision in the nineteenth century; there was only an explosion of visual devices and their uses by whoever had the wherewithal to put them to use” (374). More recently, Martin Willis has taken a similar stance, emphasising the plurality of visual experience: “acts of seeing were performances of extraordinary variation that occurred at each individual site of visual exchange” (2). However, it is my contention that conceptualising Victorian visuality as a pluralism of discourses allows for such variation as discourses fluctuate and shift from one text to another (in the way that a shared metaphor shifts slightly in transitions) whilst still retaining the usefulness of models and paradigms. See Kevin Z. Moore, “Viewing the Victorians: Recent Research on Victorian Visuality,” Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 2 (1997); Martin Willis, Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).
- 2.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “On Visuality,” Journal of Visual Culture, 5, no. 1 (2006): 53–79.
- 3.
See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
- 4.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Mitchell’s exploration of “hypericons” that express ideation itself also relates to the role of metaphors in temporal experience which will be discussed in Chap. 2. Jay explains his approach earlier in his essay “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3–29.
- 5.
Examples include Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski (London: Routledge, 2004); William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
- 6.
See, for instance, Mitchell’s “hypericons”—visual figures for thought such as Plato’s cave, Aristotle’s wax tablet, Locke’s dark room, Wittgenstein’s hieroglyph—in Iconology. Jay gives an impressive history of vision in European cultures from Plato to the twentieth century in Downcast Eyes.
- 7.
In The Victorians and the Visual Imagination and Victorian Glassworlds, Kate Flint and Isobel Armstrong, respectively, provide valuable and persuasive insights into these new nineteenth-century ways of seeing. In particular, their emphasis on the shifting pluralisms involved in visual and imaginative acts and ideas throughout the century has influenced my approach. Discourses of Vision is not a work “for” or “against” Flint and Armstrong’s books but a corollary that aims to more fully open up the different meanings involved in visuality and imagination in the nineteenth century.
- 8.
Patricia Anderson conducted an extensive study of the development of nineteenth-century print culture and the concomitant proliferation of images in The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
- 9.
In Twilight of the Idols (1888), Nietzsche writes “This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal” (36).
- 10.
One might think here of Isobel Armstrong’s work on glass culture or Marina Warner’s broad study of “spirit” as emblematic of this generalised sense that technology became inextricable from imaginative cultural forms sometime after the eighteenth century. This has been implied elsewhere by attention to various forms of media as well as explicit claims about technology as a whole. For those new to the wealth of work on technology and literature in the period, Clare Pettitt provides a useful introduction in “‘The annihilation of space and time’: literature and technology,” in The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, ed. Kate Flint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 550–572. See also the edited collection Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770–1930, ed. Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fraser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 11.
There have been preliminary explorations conducted by scholars concerned with nineteenth-century panoramas. In particular, see Erkki Huhtamo’s explication of “discursive panoramas” in Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 331–361; and Shelly Jarenski’s exploration of visual-literary relations in American literature in Immersive Words: Mass Media, Visuality, and American Literature, 1839–1893 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015).
- 12.
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 142. Stefan Andriopoulos builds on Castle’s analysis to consider the magic lantern in relation to German Idealism in Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013).
- 13.
This builds on, and owes a debt to, the work of Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman who consider visual technologies in relation to the imagination, Jonathan Crary’s work on nineteenth-century vision and culture, and Erkki Huhtamo’s explication of “discursive panoramas.” There is also a body of work on technology and literature, most notably Herbert L. Sussman’s Victorians and the Machine (1968) which, despite being an excellent resource, is limited by a tendency to conflate all machines under the term “technology,” and the wide body of work on technologies and shows of the nineteenth century, which are too many to list in full here. Examples include Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (London: Harvard University Press, 1978); Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2001); Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770–1930, ed. Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fraser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 14.
Lewis Carroll, “Photography Extraordinary,” in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, ed. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 28. The story was originally published in Carroll’s periodical Misch-Masch (1855–1862) which he circulated among his family and friends.
- 15.
Carroll, “Photography Extraordinary,” 29.
- 16.
Carroll, “Photography Extraordinary,” 29.
- 17.
Carroll, “Photography Extraordinary,” 30–31.
- 18.
Jacob Bigelow, Elements of Technology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Hillard, Cray, Little and Wilkins, 1831), 54.
- 19.
Interestingly, language also fits with more modern conceptions of “technology” since, like a computer, it can be adapted and manipulated for different applications. Similarly, the shifting applications of a computer often rely on the coded instructions (“software”) rather than on the material construct itself (the “hardware”). Timothy Morton draws similar parallels with a number of adaptable Victorian technologies in “Victorian Hyperobjects,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36, no. 5 (2014): 489–500, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2014.974940.
- 20.
Richard Henry Horne, The Dreamer and the Worker: A Story of the Present Time, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1851), ix.
- 21.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On Poesy or Art” (1818), in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: W. Pickering, 1836), 216.
- 22.
Coleridge, “On Poesy or Art,” 222.
- 23.
Onita Vaz-Hooper uses the example of Thomas De Quincey and the magic lantern to argue that even writers who decried popular visual entertainment might use the same technologies to conceptualise perceptual experience. It was thus not the technology per se that was the problem but usages which did not pay proper attention to the spiritual or internal. See Onita Vaz-Hooper, “Dream Technology: The Mechanization of the De Quinceyan Imagination,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 36, no. 2 (2014): 165–177.
- 24.
Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964, repr. 2000), 195. The concept was further developed by David E. Nye in American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
- 25.
For some useful examples, see William H. Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2008); Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
- 26.
Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality, 5.
- 27.
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” Edinburgh Review, vol. 49, ed. Francis Jeffrey, June 1829, 442.
- 28.
Leo Marx, “‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Social Research, 64, no. 3 (1997): 968.
- 29.
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 331.
- 30.
John Plunkett and Andrew King, “Introduction,” Victorian Print Media: A Reader, ed. John Plunkett and Andrew King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
- 31.
Altick, The Shows of London, 1.
- 32.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, 1827–8, trans. Robert R. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 116.
- 33.
Interestingly, a remarkably similar account of sensory perception is given by Herbert Spencer in the mid-century . See Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology [online] (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), 394–395. Available from http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1394#Spencer_0625_396.
- 34.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969 repr. 1994), 5. Subsequent in-text page citations refer to this edition.
- 35.
David Couzens Hoy provides a helpful discussion of temporality and the various philosophical approaches to time that it might encompass or involve in The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Boston: MIT Press, 2012).
- 36.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1963 repr. 2002), 477–478.
- 37.
- 38.
Albert Einstein, of course, predicted the fallacy of this apparent objectivity in his theories of general and special relativity, and various later experiments, such as the famous Hafele-Keating experiment in 1971, have appeared to confirm this.
- 39.
See Hoy, The Time of Our Lives, xiv.
- 40.
Edward T. Hall’s anthropological work on time remains instructive in its categorisations of time and its explanation of the role of culture in constructing these. It is of particular interest that the sense of time as a concrete thing (implicated by the noun forms of “past,” “present,” “summer,” “winter,” “yesterday,” “today,” etc.) is a conceptual apparatus that is not shared by all cultures—Hall examines some of the consequences of this in reference to relations between Native American cultures and the Anglo-European US government. For my own purposes, these distinctions are peripheral, but, as this book discusses time in relation to visual media, it is interesting to consider how viewing the past through, say, a photograph further solidifies a sense of past as concrete thing. See Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
- 41.
Anon. “Speaking to the Eye (from the Economist),” Illustrated London News, 24 May 1851.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Potter, J. (2018). Introduction. In: Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89736-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89737-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)