Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 examines how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular: Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.

Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 examines how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular: Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.

This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.

At the intersection of law, literature and history, this book interrogates how a dominant contemporary idea of law emerged out of specific ideas of reading in the nineteenth century. Reading shapes our identities. How we read shapes who we are. Reading also shapes our conceptions of what the law is, because the law is also a practice of reading. Focusing on the works of key Victorian writers closely associated with legal practice, this book addresses the way in which the identity of the reader of law has been modelled on the identity of the political elite. At the same time, it shows how other readers of law have been marginalised. The book thus shows how a construction of the law has emerged from the ordering of a power that discriminates between different readers and readings. More specifically, and in response to the emerging media of photography – and, with it, potentially subversive ideas of exposure and visibility – the book shows that there have been dominant, hidden and unrecognised guides to legal reading and to legal thought. And in making these visible, the book also aims to make them contestable. This secret history of law will appeal to legal historians, legal theorists, those working at the intersection of law and literature and others with interests in law and the visual.

At the turn of the 20th century, printing and photographic technologies evolved rapidly, leading to the birth of mass media and the rise of the amateur photographer. Demonstrating how this development happened symbiotically with great changes in the shape of British literature, Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880-1920 explores this co-evolution, showing that as both writing and photography became tools of mass dissemination, literary writers were forced to re-evaluate their professional and personal identities. Focusing on four key authors-Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf-each of which had their own private and professional connections to photographs, this book offers valuable historical contexts for contemporary cultural developments and anxieties. At first establishing the authors' response to developing technologies through their non-fiction, personal correspondences and working drafts, Ennis moves on to examine how their perceptions of photography extend into their major works of fiction: A Laodicean, Dracula, The Secret Agent, The Inheritors and The Voyage Out. Reflecting on the first 'graphic revolution' in a world where text and image are now reproduced digitally and circulated en masse and online, Ennis redirects our attention to when image and text appeared alongside each other for the first time and the crises this sparked for authors: how they would respond to increasingly photographic depictions of everyday life, and in turn, how their writing adapted to a distinctly visual mass media.

Analysing a broad range of texts by inventors, cultural critics, photographers, and novelists, this book argues that Victorian photography ultimately defined the concept of memory for generations to come – including our own. The book will be of interest to students of Victorian and modernist literature, visual culture and intellectual history, as well as scholars working within the emerging field of research at the intersection of photographic and literary studies.

In The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature, Atsuko Sakaki closely examines photography-inspired texts by four Japanese novelists: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965), Abe Kōbō (1924-93), Horie Toshiyuki (b. 1964) and Kanai Mieko (b. 1947). As connoisseurs, practitioners or critics of this visual medium, these authors look beyond photographs’ status as images that document and verify empirical incidents and existences, articulating instead the physical process of photographic production and photographs’ material presence in human lives. This book offers insight into the engagement with photography in Japanese literary texts as a means of bringing forgotten subject-object dynamics to light. It calls for a fundamental reconfiguration of the parameters of modern print culture and its presumption of the transparency of agents of representation.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work.

Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image. Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.