Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism [Paperback]

Nancy Armstrong (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674008014 | ISBN-13: 978-0674008014 | Publication Date: May 3, 2002

Victorians were fascinated with how accurately photography could copy people, the places they inhabited, and the objects surrounding them. Much more important, however, is the way in which Victorian people, places, and things came to resemble photographs. In this provocative study of British realism, Nancy Armstrong explains how fiction entered into a relationship with the new popular art of photography that transformed the world into a picture. By the 1860s, to know virtually anyone or anything was to understand how to place him, her, or it in that world on the basis of characteristics that either had been or could be captured in one of several photographic genres. So willing was the readership to think of the real as photographs, that authors from Charles Dickens to the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf had to use the same visual conventions to represent what was real, especially when they sought to debunk those conventions. The Victorian novel's collaboration with photography was indeed so successful, Armstrong contends, that literary criticism assumes a text is gesturing toward the real whenever it invokes a photograph.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Highly dependent upon images, the 19th-century realistic novel reflected a new kind of pictorial thinking. In this engaging look at Victorian fiction, Armstrong (comparative literature, Brown Univ.) shows how the unprecedented popularity of photography affected and informed the works of major writers. Choosing well from classic Victorian novels, Armstrong examines the works of authors like Dickens, Emily Bront?, and Oscar Wilde as she traces the development of realism and discusses the powerful visual clues that began to drive plot and determine how characters relate to one another. As much social commentary as literary criticism, the book brings to life a society obsessed with the camera and burdened with what Armstrong calls a "mass visuality." An important work that belongs in academic and larger public libraries.
-Ellen Sullivan, Ferguson Lib., Stamford, CT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

In this engaging look at Victorian fiction, Armstrong show how the unprecedented popularity of photography affected and informed the works of major writers. Choosing well from classic Victorian novels, Armstrong examines the works of authors like Dickens, Emily Bronte;, and Oscar Wilde as she traces the development of realism and discusses the powerful visual clues that began to drive plot and determine how characters relate to one another. As much social commentary as literary criticism, the book brings to life a society obsessed with the camera and burdened with what Armstrong calls a 'mass visuality.' An important work.
--Ellen Sullivan (Library Journal )

Here is intellectual leadership at its best. Entirely responsive to yet entirely independent of the conventional explanations of the origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fiction, Nancy Armstrong argues that the photographic image has long been present as a structuring principle in both realist and modernist modes of writing. By foregrounding visuality, she radically reconceptualizes the relationship between realism and modernism, bringing about a paradigm shift with which scholars will have to reckon in the decades to come. As much a model of critical imagination as it is of scholarly integrity, this book accomplishes what only the rarest of books do: it teaches you how to think.
--Rey Chow, author of Ethics after Idealism

Nancy Armstrong, a well-known literary critic, has contributed a major work to the new field of visual studies. The crossover is significant, for she manages to highlight the complex interplays between work and image, photography and prose, production and reception, in order to show how image-making subtly replaced writing as the grounding of fiction. The pictorial persuasions that she charts in a variety of Victorian genres subtly invert standard notions of both realism and readership. Armstrong's range is broad, her erudition and imagination are impressive, and her command of theory in putting it all together is simply stunning.
--Michael Holly, author of Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image

Exploring a dazzling variety of topics--landscape gardening, cartes de visite, folklore, contagious diseases legislation, the shift to paper currency, Bleak House, Dorian Gray, Heathcliff, and Alice--Nancy Armstrong pursues a single and original theme: the absolute interdependence of literary realism and the advent of photography in nineteenth-century Britain. Her elegant and compelling account makes it clear that visual studies is more than an interesting new field of study. Rather, it is central to the projects of aesthetic theory and literary history.
--Janet Wolff, author of The Social Production of Art

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674008014
• ISBN-13: 978-0674008014
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,143,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I feel sorry for the previous reviewer, April 13, 2001

By 

Adrian (El Paso , TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Hardcover)

Can the first reviewer seem more jealous and heated about the fact that his academic career has met its demise some time ago? It's ok, just try again. Hey, anything is possible. Why dont you meet Professor Armstrong beforee being so rude. Get out of your cloud of mediocrity. Read this book!

9 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Academic Buddy System At Its Best, January 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Hardcover)

"Here is intellectual leadership at its best" gushes Rey Chow, a cronie of Nancy Armstrong's, in her intemperate review of Armstrong's minor monograph on photography and realism. Chow seems to suggest that this is not just another tenure-grabbing piece of academic fluff, but, rather, that Armstrong has altered the world forever: "By foregrounding visuality, she radically reconceptualizes the relationship between realism and the modern, bringing about a paradigm shift with which scholars will have to reckon in the decades to come." Whoa, Rey! Let's not get carried away paying back Armstrong for her good reviews of your work! Chow's inflated rhetoric leads one to believe that we've entered an entirely new dimension of experience, a new understanding of the world that will leave us all dumbfounded and amazed by the newness of a once puzzling universe. She seems to think that a new revelation has been lowered from Heaven to cast light upon a previously murky world, and the notion that photography has flooded modern consciousness and the modern novel is somehow startling in its implications. "As much a model of critical imagination as it is of scholarly integrity, this book accomplishes what only the rarest of books do: it teaches you how to think." The ultimate scratching of the academic back: thanks for forming my brain, Nancy. Before reading this book I was ignorant. Now I can think. Cheers. Ah, yes -- by using the now hoary marxist-feminist device of concentrating on the controlling gaze of the viewer ("visuality"), by insisting on the material realm (even if only as "the real") in contrast to the spiritual realm, by tossing around a few of the usual post-structuralist devices of distancing the object and reconstituting it within a new context, she garners the acolades of her cronies as the Great Remaker of Modern Thought. Wow! This book is, in essence, more a testimony to the nature of contemporary academic politics and buddy systems than it is to anything else, and all of the praise heaped upon it cannot change the fact that it will have only as much influence as a few professors can wring out of it in their seminars. Good luck, people.