Invented during a period of anxiety about the ability of human memory to cope with the demands of expanding knowledge, photography not only changed the way the Victorians saw the world, but also provided them with a new sense of connection with the past and a developing language with which to describe it. Analysing a broad range of texts by inventors, cultural critics, photographers, and novelists, Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past argues that Victorian photography ultimately defined the concept of memory for generations to come –including our own. In addition to being invaluable for scholars working within the emerging field of research at the intersection of photographic and literary studies, this book will also be of interest to students of Victorian and modernist literature, visual culture and intellectual history.

Invented during a period of anxiety about the ability of human memory to cope with the demands of expanding knowledge, photography not only changed the way the Victorians saw the world, but also provided them with a new sense of connection with the past and a developing language with which to describe it. Analysing a broad range of texts by inventors, cultural critics, photographers, and novelists, Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past argues that Victorian photography ultimately defined the concept of memory for generations to come -including our own. In addition to being invaluable for scholars working within the emerging field of research at the intersection of photographic and literary studies, this book will also be of interest to students of Victorian and modernist literature, visual culture and intellectual history.

"Photography symbolized the possibility of creating an ideal archive to many Victorians, an archive in which no moment or experience need be forgotten. This seductive idea had particular appeal for a generation of writers preoccupied with their own mortality and the erosion of tradition in an age distracted by the ever-changing spectacle of the present. many early photographers and publishers shared this temporal anxiety and the nostalgic archival proclivities it induced, and these mutual preoccupations resulted in the production of the early photographically illustrated books, verse anthologies, lantern shows, guide books, magazines and cartes de visite collections which are the subject of this book. Groth argues that these various early forms of photlographic illustration reflected and contributed to a growing alignment of reading with taking a moment out of time, and of literary experience with the nostalgic reinventions of an emerging heritage culture. Nostalgia operates both creatively and regressively in this context, providing the catalyst for new cultural forms and memory practices, whilst nurturing an intrinsically conservative desire to find a refuge from the exigencies of the present in an increasingly idealized world of tradition, family, nature, and community; a world where time appeared, for a moment at least, to stand still"--Dust jacket.

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.

Nineteenth-century photography is usually thought of in terms of ‘black and white’ images, but intense experimentation with generating and fixing colors pre-dated the public announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839. Introducing readers to the long, frequently overlooked story of the relationship of color to photography, this short anthology of primary sources includes: accounts of the scientific search for color by Elizabeth Fulhame and Sir John Herschel;photographers' views on color; extracts from the photographic press and from manuals on handcoloring; and accounts by critics such as John Ruskin. The volume provides a fresh perspective on the culture, history and theory of early photography, demonstrating why scientists, philosophers, photographers, literary writers and artists were so fascinated by the potential for polychrome in photographs. With an introductory essay arguing that from the earliest days of photography the prospect of color loomed large in the imagination of its creators, users and critics, this reader is an essential resource for students and scholars wanting to gain a full understanding of nineteenth-century photography and its relationship to art history, literature and culture.

A wide-ranging exploration of the complex and often conflicting discourse on photography in the nineteenth century, Framing the Victorians traces various descriptions of photography as art, science, magic, testimony, proof, document, record, illusion, and diagnosis. Victorian photography, argues Jennifer Green-Lewis, inspired such universal fascination that even two so self-consciously opposed schools as positivist realism and metaphysical romance claimed it as their own. Photography thus became at once the symbol of the inadequacy of nineteenth-century empiricism and the proof of its totalizing vision. Green-Lewis juxtaposes textual descriptions with pictorial representations of a diverse array of cultural activities from war and law enforcement to novel writing and psychiatry. She compares, for example, the exhibition of Roger Fenton's Crimean War photographs (1855) with W. H. Russell's written accounts of the war published in the Times of London (1884 and 1886). Nineteenth-century photography, she maintains, must be reread in the context of Victorian written texts from and against which it developed. Green-Lewis also draws on works by Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, as well as published writing by Victorian photographers, in support of her view that photography provides an invaluable model for understanding the act of writing itself. We cannot talk about realism in the nineteenth century without talking about visuality, claims Green-Lewis, and Framing the Victorians explores the connections.

At the turn of the 20th century, printing and photographic technologies evolved rapidly, leading to the birth of mass media and the rise of the amateur photographer. Demonstrating how this development happened symbiotically with great changes in the shape of British literature, Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880-1920 explores this co-evolution, showing that as both writing and photography became tools of mass dissemination, literary writers were forced to re-evaluate their professional and personal identities. Focusing on four key authors-Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf-each of which had their own private and professional connections to photographs, this book offers valuable historical contexts for contemporary cultural developments and anxieties. At first establishing the authors' response to developing technologies through their non-fiction, personal correspondences and working drafts, Ennis moves on to examine how their perceptions of photography extend into their major works of fiction: A Laodicean, Dracula, The Secret Agent, The Inheritors and The Voyage Out. Reflecting on the first 'graphic revolution' in a world where text and image are now reproduced digitally and circulated en masse and online, Ennis redirects our attention to when image and text appeared alongside each other for the first time and the crises this sparked for authors: how they would respond to increasingly photographic depictions of everyday life, and in turn, how their writing adapted to a distinctly visual mass media.