A carefully researched study of the new visual wonders of the nineteenth-century—the kaleidoscope, the magic lantern, the dissolving view, the Thaumatrope, and Phenakistoscope. It shows, with wonderful illumination of its own, how they shaped literary practice and "psychological aesthetics" in the decades before cinema.

James Chandler, University of Chicago

Helen Groth's brilliant study opens new vistas for thinking about literature and moving images. From Byron onwards, Groth brings this world to life in ways that help us understand the complexity of the relationship between words and images for their time and ours.

Jon Mee, University of York

Examines the moving image in relation to nineteenth-century literature, theories of mind, and visual mediaThis book examines how the productive interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind. Reading between these parallel histories of mind and media reveals a dynamic conceptual, aesthetic and technological engagement with the moving image that, in turn, produces a new understanding of the production and circulation of the work of key nineteenth-century writers, such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. As Helen Groth shows, this engagement is both typical of the nineteenth-century in its preoccupation with questions of automatism and volition (unconscious and conscious thought), spirit and materiality, art and machine, but also definitively modern in its secular articulation of the instructive and entertaining applications of making images move both inside and outside the mind. Key Features Considers the impact of the dramatic transformations in print and visual culture on our understanding of the production, circulation and mediation of works by Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Carroll, Dickens, Mayhew and James, as well as lesser-known writers such as Ann and Jane Taylor, Pierce Egan, Countess Blessington, and George SimsProvides a new perspective on the conventional opposition of the early cinema of attractions to the immersive absorption of both nineteenth-century literary formations and later classical narrative cinema
Les mer
This book examines how the interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind.
Les mer
Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices; Chapter 1: Moving Books in Regency London; Chapter 2: Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media; Chapter 3: Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott; Chapter 4: Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper’s Ghost; Chapter 5: Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice; Chapter 6: Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image; Chapter 7: Literary Projections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul; Bibliography.
Les mer
Considers the impact of the dramatic transformations in print and visual culture on our understanding of the production, circulation and mediation of works by Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Carroll, Dickens, Mayhew and James, as well as lesser-known writers such as Ann and Jane Taylor, Pierce Egan, Countess Blessington, and George Sims
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780748669486
Publisert
2013-08-23
Utgiver
Edinburgh University Press; Edinburgh University Press
Vekt
483 gr
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
224

Forfatter

Om bidragsyterne

Helen Groth is Professor of English in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales. She is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 2004), Moving Images. Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and co-author of Dreams and Modernity. A Cultural History (Routledge, 2013). She is the co-editor of a number of books and special journal issues, most recently Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Writing the Global Riot (Oxford University Press, 2023).