Seeing Things
Book 1
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Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Home > Biographies & Memoire > Literature: history and criticism > Literary studies: general > Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 > Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture
Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture

Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture


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About the Book

A cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries, Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies – magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics – an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there.

The popularization of Victorian optical media redefined visuality as a rational mode of spectatorship that taught audiences to distinguish illusion from reality. As an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe, to be entertained without being deceived, it became a sign of western supremacy. By tracing the development of virtual aesthetics through nineteenth-century writings, from the novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens to popular science writing and imperial travelogues, Seeing Things recovers a formative period of technological and literary innovation to explain how optical media not only anticipated cinema but became a paradigmatic media aesthetic of western modernity.



Table of Contents:

Introduction: What Was the Virtual?
1. Magic Panic: The Pedagogy of Disenchantment
2. The Mirror of Ink: Realism, Orientalism, and Vision at a Distance
3. Mountains of Light: The Koh-i-Noor at the Great Exhibition
4. Recalled to Life: Phantasmagoria as the History of the French Revolution
5. Spinning in Place: Trapped in the Moving Picture Machine
Epilogue: Arrival of a Train



About the Author :

Amanda Shubert is Teaching Faculty in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9781501783692
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Cornell University Press
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1501783696
  • Publisher Date: 15 Nov 2025
  • Binding: Other book format
  • Sub Title: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture


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