Amanda Shubert

Seeing Things (eBook, ePUB)

Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries, Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies-magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics-an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there.

The popularization of Victorian optical media redefined visuality as a rational mode of spectatorship that taught audiences to distinguish illusion from reality. As an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe, to be entertained without being deceived, it became a sign of western supremacy. By tracing the development of virtual aesthetics through nineteenth-century writings, from the novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens to popular science writing and imperial travelogues, Seeing Things recovers a formative period of technological and literary innovation to explain how optical media not only anticipated cinema but became a paradigmatic media aesthetic of western modernity.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Seitenzahl: 252
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. November 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501783692
• Artikelnr.: 75633672

Autorenporträt

Amanda Shubert is Teaching Faculty in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: What Was the Virtual?
1. Magic Panic: The Pedagogy of Disenchantment
2. The Mirror of Ink: Realism, Orientalism, and Vision at a Distance
3. Mountains of Light: The Koh-i-Noor at the Great Exhibition
4. Recalled to Life: Phantasmagoria as the History of the French Revolution
5. Spinning in Place: Trapped in the Moving Picture Machine
Epilogue: Arrival of a Train