By Helen Groth
This 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 Sims
- Provides 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
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