Impressed by Light

Impressed by Light PDF Author: Roger Taylor
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588392252
Category : Calotype
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Photography emerged in 1839 in two forms simultaneously. In France, Louis Daguerre produced photographs on silvered sheets of copper, while in Great Britain, William Henry Fox Talbot put forward a method of capturing an image on ordinary writing paper treated with chemicals. Talbot’s invention, a paper negative from which any number of positive prints could be made, became the progenitor of virtually all photography carried out before the digital age. Talbot named his perfected invention "calotype," a term based on the Greek word for beauty. Calotypes were characterized by a capacity for subtle tonal distinctions, massing of light and shadow, and softness of detail. In the 1840s, amateur photographers in Britain responded with enthusiasm to the challenges posed by the new medium. Their subjects were wide-ranging, including landscapes and nature studies, architecture, and portraits. Glass-negative photography, which appeared in 1851, was based on the same principles as the paper negative but yielded a sharper picture, and quickly gained popularity. Despite the rise of glass negatives in commercial photography, many gentlemen of leisure and learning continued to use paper negatives into the 1850s and 1860s. These amateurs did not seek the widespread distribution and international reputation pursued by their commercial counterparts, nearly all of whom favored glass negatives. As a result, many of these calotype works were produced in a small number of prints for friends and fellow photographers or for a family album. This richly illustrated, landmark publication tells the first full history of the calotype, embedding it in the context of Britain’s changing fortunes, intricate class structure, ever-growing industrialization, and the new spirit under Queen Victoria. Of the 118 early photographs presented here in meticulously printed plates, many have never before been published or exhibited.

Impressed by Light

Impressed by Light PDF Author: Roger Taylor
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588392252
Category : Calotype
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Photography emerged in 1839 in two forms simultaneously. In France, Louis Daguerre produced photographs on silvered sheets of copper, while in Great Britain, William Henry Fox Talbot put forward a method of capturing an image on ordinary writing paper treated with chemicals. Talbot’s invention, a paper negative from which any number of positive prints could be made, became the progenitor of virtually all photography carried out before the digital age. Talbot named his perfected invention "calotype," a term based on the Greek word for beauty. Calotypes were characterized by a capacity for subtle tonal distinctions, massing of light and shadow, and softness of detail. In the 1840s, amateur photographers in Britain responded with enthusiasm to the challenges posed by the new medium. Their subjects were wide-ranging, including landscapes and nature studies, architecture, and portraits. Glass-negative photography, which appeared in 1851, was based on the same principles as the paper negative but yielded a sharper picture, and quickly gained popularity. Despite the rise of glass negatives in commercial photography, many gentlemen of leisure and learning continued to use paper negatives into the 1850s and 1860s. These amateurs did not seek the widespread distribution and international reputation pursued by their commercial counterparts, nearly all of whom favored glass negatives. As a result, many of these calotype works were produced in a small number of prints for friends and fellow photographers or for a family album. This richly illustrated, landmark publication tells the first full history of the calotype, embedding it in the context of Britain’s changing fortunes, intricate class structure, ever-growing industrialization, and the new spirit under Queen Victoria. Of the 118 early photographs presented here in meticulously printed plates, many have never before been published or exhibited.

Digital Victorians

Digital Victorians PDF Author: Paul Fyfe
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503640957
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution. Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence in the face of new technology, and more—telling a longer history of how writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already digital.

Victorian Structures

Victorian Structures PDF Author: Jody Griffith
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438478313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Argues that the descriptions of buildings frequently encountered in Victorian novels offer more than evocative settings for characters and plot; instead, such descriptions signal these novels’ self-reflexive consideration of the structure itself. Although Victorian novels often feature lengthy descriptions of the buildings where characters live, work, and pray, we may not always notice the stories these buildings tell. But when we do pay attention, we find these buildings offer more than evocative background settings. Victorian Structures uses the architectural writings of Victorian critic John Ruskin as a framework for examining the interaction of physical, social, and narrative structures in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Adam Bede by George Eliot, and The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. By closely reading their descriptions of architectural structure, this book reconsiders structure itself—both the social structures the novels reflect, and the narrative structures they employ. Weaving together analysis of these three kinds of structure offers an interpretation of Victorian realism that is far more socially and formally unstable than critics have tended to assume. It illustrates how these novels radically critique the limitations, dysfunctions, and deceptions of structure, while also imagining alternative possibilities. This unique interdisciplinary approach emphasizes structure-in-time: while current conversations about structure focus on its static and fixed properties, this book understands it as various forces in tension, producing meanings that are always in flux. Victorian Structures focuses not only on the way structures shape our perceptions and experiences, but also, more importantly, on the processes through which those structures come to be constructed in the first place, and how they change over time. “For Jody Griffith, ‘form’ is not merely a controversial topic for twenty-first-century literary critics: it’s also the architectural form of John Ruskin, living and changing over time. Her book blends contemporary methods with nineteenth-century ideas to arrive at original formalist readings of the Victorian novel.” — Rachel Teukolsky, Vanderbilt University

Victorian Negatives

Victorian Negatives PDF Author: Susan E. Cook
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438475373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Argues that the photographic negative gives a new way of understanding Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies as well as reality and representation. Victorian Negatives examines the intersection between Victorian photography and literary culture, and argues that the development of the photographic negative played an instrumental role in their confluence. The negative is a technology that facilitates photographic reproduction by way of image inversion, and Susan E. Cook argues that this particular photographic technology influenced the British realist novel and literary celebrity culture, as authors grappled with the technology of inversion and reproduction in their lives and works. The book analyzes literary works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Cyril Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, and puts readings of those works into conversations with distinct photographic forms, including the daguerreotype, solarization, forensic photography, common cabinet cards, double exposures, and postmortem portraiture. In addition to literary texts, the book analyzes photographic discourses from letters and public writings of photographers and the nineteenth-century press, as well as discussions and debates surrounding Victorian celebrity authorship. The book’s focus on the negative both illuminates an oft-marginalized part of the history of photography and demonstrates the way in which this history is central to Victorian literary culture. “This is a fascinating and extremely specific discussion of the ways in which photography, more precisely negative technology, was ‘culturally embedded’ in the Victorian era. It is this precision that makes the book most compelling; as Cook herself notes, most literary scholars treat photography as a monolithic whole, but she offers a welcome specificity.” — Antonia Losano, author of The Victorian Painter in Victorian Literature

Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century

Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Katherine Haldane Grenier
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030376478
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This collection provides a long-overdue examination of the nineteenth century as a crucible of new commemorative practices. Distinctive memory cultures emerged during this period which would fundamentally reshape public and private practices of remembrance in the modern world. The essays in this volume bring together scholars of History, Literature, Art History, and Musicology to explore uses of memory in nineteenth-century empire-building and constructions of national identity, cultures of sentiment and mourning practices, and discourses of race and power. Contributors approach the topic through case studies of Europe, the United States, and the British Empire. Their analyses of nineteenth-century innovations in commemoration at both the personal and the larger civic and political levels will appeal to students and scholars of memory and of the nineteenth-century world.

Understanding the Victorians

Understanding the Victorians PDF Author: Susie L. Steinbach
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000898962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of an era of dramatic change, combining broad survey with close analysis and introducing students to the critical debates on the nineteenth century taking place among historians today. The volume encompasses all of Great Britain and Ireland over the whole of the Victorian period and gives prominence to social and cultural topics alongside politics and economics and emphasizes class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This third edition is fully updated with new chapters on emotion and on Britain’s relationship with Europe as well as added discussions of architecture, technology, and the visual arts. Attention to the current concerns and priorities of professional historians also enables readers to engage with today’s historical debates. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming up to the start of World War I in 1914, thematic chapters explore the topics of space, politics, Europe, the empire, the economy, consumption, class, leisure, gender, the monarchy, the law, arts and entertainment, sexuality, religion, and science. With a clear introduction outlining the key themes of the period, a detailed timeline, and suggestions for further reading and relevant internet resources, this is the ideal companion for all students of the nineteenth century. Discover more from Susie by exploring our forthcoming Routledge Historical resource on British Society, edited by Susie L. Steinbach and Martin Hewitt. Find out more about our Routledge Historical resources by visiting https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com.

Literary Remains

Literary Remains PDF Author: Mary Elizabeth Hotz
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791476596
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Explores Victorian responses to death and burial in literature, journalism, and legal writing. Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO’s Six Feet Under, quipped, “Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything.” So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses at the center of an extensive range of concerns, including money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity, Mary Elizabeth Hotz draws on a range of legal, administrative, journalistic, and literary writing to offer a thoughtful meditation on Victorian attitudes toward death and burial, as well as how those attitudes influenced present-day deathway practices. Literary Remains gives new meaning to the phrase that serves as its significant theme: “Taught by death what life should be.” “...Literary Remains is a fantastic literary companion and is worth reading even if you’re not initially interested in burial practices.” — M/C Reviews “ Hotz not only contextualizes her readings within a historical framework surrounding the passage of the Burial Acts, the building of large public cemeteries in the suburbs, and the late-century introduction of cremation as a widespread social practice, but offers a perceptive and compelling rhetorical analysis of the sociological, political, and theological discourse about burial.” — Victorian Studies “ the painstaking research on debates about funerary reform that Hotz brings together will be valuable for future investigations of death in Victorian culture.” — Studies in English Literature “This is an ambitious, energetic and rigorous attempt to do that very difficult thing, integrate detailed and historically informed analysis of the documents of nineteenth-century burial reform and of major literary texts into a lucid and complex argument that doesn’t fight shy of contradiction and difficulty.” — Mortality “Drawing on a vast range of primary sources—official documents, newspapers and periodicals, travel guides—and the work of anthropologists, historians, and the substantial engagements within literary studies dealing with representations of death and the dead, Hotz’s perceptive, engaging, and eloquent study will be welcomed by a range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences.” — CHOICE “I read this fascinating book with great pleasure. It makes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian practices of death and burial and will be an essential supplement to existing studies of the culture of Victorian melancholy and bereavement.” — Joel Faflak, author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery

Antipodal England

Antipodal England PDF Author:
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438427182
Category : Australia
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description


Victorian Giants

Victorian Giants PDF Author: Phillip Prodger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
« Oscar Rejlander (1813–75), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), Lewis Carroll (1832–98) and Clementina Hawarden (1822–65) embody the very best of photography from the Victorian era. They experimented with new approaches to picture making and shaped attitudes towards photography that have informed artistic practice ever since. Discover the images that made people think about the photograph as a work of art in this beautiful book. »--

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad PDF Author: Debra Romanick Baldwin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040047084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad attests to the global significance and enduring importance of Conrad’s works, reception, and legacy. This volume brings together an international roster of scholars who consider his works in relation to biography, narrative, politics, women’s studies, comparative literature, and other forms of art. They offer approaches as diverse as re-examining Conrad’s sea voyages using newly available digital materials, analyzing his archipelagic narrative techniques, applying Chinese philosophy to Lord Jim, interrogating gendered epistemology in the neglected story “The Tale,” considering Conrad alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, or Orhan Pamuk, or alongside sound, gesture, opera, graphic novels, or contemporary events. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of Conrad and twentieth-century literature, this groundbreaking collection shows how Conrad’s works – their artistry, vision, and ideas – continue to challenge, perplex, and delight.