Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915

Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 looks at 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, each of whom deals with the transition between photographic methodologies. The book argues that their writing can be analysed most fruitfully via a consideration of technological difference.

Clayton examines how the transition between different methods affected the ways in which writers rethought photography. His central claim is that nineteenth-century authors were more aware of the particularities of different technologies than has previously been realised. Literature and Photography in Transition contributes to a better understanding of how nineteenth-century writers negotiated visual technologies. It provides a new means by which scholars can read the relationship between literature and early photography.

Owen Clayton is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln. His interests include transatlantic visual culture of the long nineteenth-century, working–class studies and, increasingly, Anglo-Saxonism. He is a previous winner of the William Dean Howells Essay Prize, and the British Association of American Studies Ambassador's Award.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. E Pluribus Unum: History and Photographic Difference
2. Hybrid Photographies in London Labour and the London Poor
3. Composing Gendered Selfhoods in Robert Louis Stevenson and Amy Levy
4. 'We do the rest': Photography, Labour and Howellsian Realism
5. 'Literature of Attractions': Jack London and Early Cinema
Afterword
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index