By Alison Byerly
Are We There Yet?
Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination
with "virtual travel" with the rise of realism in nineteenth-century
fiction and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the
expansion of river and railway networks in the nineteenth century made travel
easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned
into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas,
foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes
for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of "virtual
travel" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination
with imaginative dislocation and twenty-first -century efforts to use digital
technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.
Byerly’s work is unusual in approaching a Victorian
phenomenon through the lens of contemporary conceptualizations of media and its
effects. Other critics who have applied current theories about media to
nineteenth century cultural forms have generally focused on the social or
economic dimensions of these forms in order to examine topics like
representations of empire, ideas about gender, or the development of consumer
culture. This book places cultural studies into dialogue with an aesthetics
that is re-energized by engagement with contemporary debates about virtual
reality. It is a foundational work in the emerging field of Victorian
media studies.
"Byerly is chock-full of new materials brought into
view through a fresh perspective straightforwardly grounded in the
network-computer concerns of our present. It feels both intuitively right and
brilliant."—Jonathan H. Grossman, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Charles Dickens’s Networks
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