This book fills a gap in existing scholarship on the history of the novel in relation to visual culture by discussing the visual fascination that novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot show for several types of pre-cinematic spectacle.

1: Introduction.- 2: Traces and Origins, Signs and Meanings: Analogy and the Thaumatrope in Melville’s Pierre, or, the Ambiguities.- 3: The Portraiture of Modern Life: Dioramas, Phantasmagorias, Daguerrotypes and the Unweaving of Narrative and Textuality in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables.- 4: Precinema and the Visualization of Nineteenth-Century Realism: Balzac.- Precinema and the Visualization of Nineteenth-Century Realism: Eliot.- 5: Conclusion.

This book fills a gap in existing scholarship on the history of the novel in relation to visual culture by discussing the visual fascination that novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot show for several types of pre-cinematic spectacle. It also identifies a so far neglected aspect of novel theory that nineteenth-century authors elaborated by incorporating suggestions from pre-cinematic visual spectacles. By shedding light on forms of visuality that were not entertained by the dominant aesthetic modes of painting and photography, The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination argues that the presence of nineteenth century pre-cinematic optical illusions in works of fiction redefines the notion of mimesis as animated movement and points to a continuity between pre-cinema, the literary imagination and the structures of knowledge production of the modern episteme. Alberto Gabriele is the author of Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (2009) and The Emergence of Pre-Cinema: Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination (2016). He also edited Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective (2017). He has previously been a Macgeorge fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. 

“Alberto Gabriele’s book makes an important intervention in debates about fiction and modernity.  Building on the work of Jonathan Crary, Werner Nekes, and Lindsay Smith, among others, it argues that from the 1830s to the 1870s we can track convergences and isomorphisms among new technologies of the visible, new disciplines, and forms of fiction. In their engagement with popular visual culture and pre-cinematic spectacle, and in what Gabriele’s terms their moments of “heightened susceptibility to vision”, European and American novelists articulate not only a sense of the constructed nature of the real, but also show a will to find order in a shifting and fragmenting world. With an impressive comparative range, this fascinating study takes us effortlessly from Melville and Hawthorne to Balzac and Eliot and makes us rethink the role of the novel in the constitution of theories of subjective knowledge and mimesis.” (Nicholas Daly, Professor of Modern English and American Literature, University College, Dublin, Ireland) “Ut Pre-cinema Poesis highlights how optical toys and spectacles inspired nineteenth-century writers, playing a central role in shaping their understanding of modernity and in expressing through their works the upheavals of their time. Alberto Gabriele's new book combines the history of technology, art, and scientific thought with a meticulous analysis of literary works; it deeply challenges the teleology of pre-cinema, reframing visual culture within a history of print and science. In doing so, it radically renews the history of nineteenth-century visual culture.” (Matthieu Letourneux, Professor of Literature, Paris Nanterre University, France)

Identifies in pre-cinematic spectacle a so far neglected aspect of novel-theory Puts under a genealogic lens the birth of the twentieth-century avant-garde Illustrates through material culture the shift in epistemology and the literary imagination in the nineteenth-century

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