The Victorians and the Visual Imagination

Drawing on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as Pre-Raphaelite and realist painters including Millais, Burne-Jones, William Powell Frith and Whistler, this richly illustrated and innovative study explores the Victorians' attitudes towards sight. It will appeal to anyone studying Victorian culture.

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The Victorians and the Visual Imagination is an exciting and innovative exploration of the Victorians' attitudes towards sight. Tantalized by physiologists who proved the unreliability of the eye, intrigued by the role of subjectivity within vision, and provoked by new technologies of spectatorship, the Victorians were also imaginatively stirred by the sense of a world which lay just out of human sight. This interdisciplinary study draws on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as Pre-Raphaelite and realist painters including Millais, Burne-Jones, William Powell Frith and Whistler, and a host of Victorian scientists, cultural commentators and art critics. Its topics include blindness, the location of memory, hallucination, dust, and the importance of the horizon - a dazzling eclectic range of subjects linked together by the operations of the eye and brain.