Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures

Through a close encounter with material objects and cultural experiences this book transforms the way we read the literary and the visual in the nineteenth century. The photograph, the illustrated magazine and the collection became centres of multisensorial perception through looking, reading, handling, sharing and writing. Attention to these embodied practices helps flesh out forms of perception and circulation which deferred and transformed desire and pleasure across media. Capturing the historically specific modes in which such objects were produced, encountered, and conceptualised, the essays in this collection argue against the separation of the senses and rethink the manner in which visuality touches the beholder both literally and metaphorically. Through early and late nineteenth-century episodes in the cultures of viewing, reading, and collecting this book makes new and sometimes surprising connections between Romanticism and the fin de siecle. Through its exploration of a material aesthetic this book offers fresh and original readings of works by William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others.