This book challenges the focus on pictoriality as central constituent of visual culture from the perspective of literary studies, which in the wake of an ‘intermedial turn’ so far focused on the ways texts relate to pictures and visual media either in praesentia (e.g. word and image studies) or in absentia (e.g. ekphrasis). Instead, it emphasizes literature’s participation in visual culture at large and focuses on three areas of investigation: (1) the depiction of, for instance, visual perceptions in the literary mode of description, which is paramount to formatting the mental aspect of visual culture; (2) the readerly practice of visualising situations and events of the fictional world, which mediates between those mentefacts and techniques of writing; (3) textual visibilities which are grounded in materiality. The volume explores these three areas from a systematically integrated perspective and the essays include in-depth treatments of seminal examples taken from Western literatures (primarily English and German, but also French and American literature) from early modern times to the present. This book’s aim is to work out literature’s active role in shaping visual culture, thus demonstrating its relevance for “image studies”.

Echoing and expanding the aims of the first volume, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, this second volume contains illuminating global Indigenous visualities concerning First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, Maori, and Sami peoples. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Indigenous film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities Two draws on American Indian studies, film studies, art history, cultural studies, visual culture studies, women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. Among the artists and media makers examined are Tasha Hubbard, Rachel Perkins, and Ehren “Bear Witness” Thomas, as well as contemporary Inuit artists and Indigenous agents of cultural production working to reimagine digital and social platforms. Films analyzed include The Exiles, Winter in the Blood, The Spirit of Annie Mae, Radiance, One Night the Moon, Bran Nue Dae, Ngati, Shimásání, and Sami Blood.

Romantic Visualities offers a culturally informed understanding of the literary significance of landscape in the Romantic period. Labbe argues that the Romantic period associated the prospect view with the masculine ideal, simultaneously fashioning the detailed point of view as feminised. An interdisciplinary study, it discusses the cultural construction of gender as defined through landscape viewing, and investigates property law, aesthetic tracts, conduct books, travel narratives, artistic theory, and the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Ann Francis, Dorothy Wordsworth and others.

This book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. This book's identification of devotional practices of looking, such as materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look, connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song, and vivid hagiographies of saints. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this book meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.

Back in the 1980s Jean Baudrillard wrote that public space was collapsing due to a double obscenity: 'The most intimate operation of your life becomes the potential grazing ground of the media....The entire universe also unfolds unnecessarily on your home screen.' He termed this the ecstasy of communication. But today, your everyday life is not just the potential grazing ground of the media, but of anyone with a camera, and the entire universe unfolds not just at home but in the palm of your hand virtually anywhere you travel. Bringing together a transdisciplinary team of leading scholars and artists from North America, Europe and Asia, this volume documents and theorizes this new visibility. It focuses on the proliferation of a range of new visual technologies, examining questions of subjectivity, agency, and surveillance as well as mapping and theorizing new practices of visuality within this new visual assemblage. New Visualities, New Technologies addresses the pressing need for the conceptual understanding of new forms of seeing, looking, presenting, and hiding.

Through the study of exemplary media works and practices - photography, film, video, performance, installations, web cams - scholars from various disciplines call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disablement of vision in contemporary aesthetics. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed, through surveillance devices, to the gaze of new figures of authority - the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification, and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity, and interrelatedness. Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, and persistently prolific in its cultural, social, and political effects. Contributors include Raymond Bellour (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), Beate Ochsner (University of Mannheim -Universität Mannheim), Claudette Lauzon (McGill University), David Tomas (Université du Québec à Montréal), Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljiana University and University of London), Marie Fraser (Université du Québec à Montréal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Julie Lavigne (Université du Québec à Montréal), Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Eric Michaud (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Hélène Samson (McCord Museum), and Thierry Bardini (Université de Montréal)."

Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This book argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. This edited volume elaborates this conceptual argument through a series of contemporary case studies, drawn from the disciplines of Architecture, Sociology, Media Studies, Geography and Cultural Studies. The case studies included are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.