The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader

The nineteenth century is central to contemporary discussions of visual culture. This reader brings together for the first time key writings about the period, exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising. Suggesting that "modernity" rather than "modernism" is a valuable way of understanding the changes particular to the visual culture of the time, the editors investigate the variety of nineteenth-century images, technologies and visual experiences, stressing in particular the very consciousness of vision and visuality. The reader begins with three specially written essays about definitions of visual culture as an object of study. "Genealogies" introduces key writings about culture from writers living in the nineteenth century itself or from those who scrutinized its visual culture from early in the twentieth century such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. The remainder is organized around themes: technologies of vision, practices of display and the circulation of images,cities and the built environment, visual representations of the past, visual representations of categories of racial, sexual and social differences, and spatial configurations of inside and out, private and public. Selections include well-known authors and new research by younger scholars to produce a well-balanced and comprehensive collection.