Art: History: Visual: Culture

Visual culture and its relationship to art history have been the subject of vigorous debate in recent years. This major new collection of essays brings together innovative scholarship on the subject by leading scholars. Drawing on a wide range of cultures, locations and historical periods, from eighth-century China to present-day South Africa, from Byzantium to early modern and modern Europe, the contributors consider theories of visuality, looking and the gaze. They explore the ways in which art history exceeds the visual, offering more than a study of images, and they make connections between vision and space, between vision and the body, and between vision, aesthetics and the senses. Offering exciting research and thoughtful reflection on one of the most pressing concerns of contemporary scholarship, this collection has been acclaimed as ls"essential reading for anyone in visual studiesrs".

Deborah Cherry is Editor of Art History and Professor of the History of Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Her publications include The Edwardian Era (1987), Treatise on the Sublime (1990), Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993), Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture (2000), and Speak English (2002). She is currently completing Living with the Dead: Reinventing the Victorians in the Twentieth Century and working on a study of contemporary installation art.