Originally published in 1998, Dynamics of the Pictured Page provides a critical study of the world's first regularly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842. Focusing on the first decade of this enormously influential weekly, this book situates the ILN within the publishing history of periodicals, arguing not only for a better understanding of those new modes of production engendered by an illustrated newspaper, but also for the need to theorize the relations between engraved images and printed text that constituted the ILN, which advertised itself as an unprecedented 'marriage' between art and literature. Through a series of interpretive interventions that focus on categories that would have had especially powerful reverberations for Victorian readers (for example, the home, the railway, the public funeral, and serialized literature), this book traces the newspaper's complex strategies of appeal to a middle-class English readership. This book will appeal to students of nineteenth-century literature and history (especially those with an interest in publishing history and the history of the press), as well as to Victorian studies scholars.

A timely and stimulating collection of essays about the impact of Darwin's ideas on visual culture

Originally published in 1998, Dynamics of the Pictured Page provides a critical study of the world's first regularly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842. Focusing on the first decade of this enormously influential weekly, this book situates the ILN within the publishing history of periodicals, arguing not only for a better understanding of those new modes of production engendered by an illustrated newspaper, but also for the need to theorize the relations between engraved images and printed text that constituted the ILN, which advertised itself as an unprecedented 'marriage' between art and literature. Through a series of interpretive interventions that focus on categories that would have had especially powerful reverberations for Victorian readers (for example, the home, the railway, the public funeral, and serialized literature), this book traces the newspaper's complex strategies of appeal to a middle-class English readership. This book will appeal to students of nineteenth-century literature and history (especially those with an interest in publishing history and the history of the press), as well as to Victorian studies scholars.

In the years just before the Civil War, during the most intensive phase of American slave-trade suppression, the U.S. Navy seized roughly 2,000 enslaved Africans from illegal slave ships and brought them into temporary camps at Key West and Charleston. In this study, Sharla Fett reconstructs the social world of these "recaptives" and recounts the relationships they built to survive the holds of slave ships, American detention camps, and, ultimately, a second transatlantic voyage to Liberia. Fett also demonstrates how the presence of slave-trade refugees in southern ports accelerated heated arguments between divergent antebellum political movements--from abolitionist human rights campaigns to slave-trade revivalism--that used recaptives to support their claims about slavery, slave trading, and race. By focusing on shipmate relations rather than naval exploits or legal trials, and by analyzing the experiences of both children and adults of varying African origins, Fett provides the first history of U.S. slave-trade suppression centered on recaptive Africans themselves. In so doing, she examines the state of "recaptivity" as a distinctive variant of slave-trade captivity and situates the recaptives' story within the broader diaspora of "Liberated Africans" throughout the Atlantic world.

Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narrative of 19th and early 20th century opera. This book shines a light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled doomed women onstage before an audience.

In his examination of the excavation of ancient Assyria by Austen Henry Layard, Shawn Malley reveals how, by whom, and for what reasons the stones of Assyria were deployed during a brief but remarkably intense period of archaeological activity in the mid-nineteenth century. His book encompasses the archaeological practices and representations that originated in Layard's excavations, radiated outward by way of the British Museum and Layard's best-selling Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), and were then dispersed into the public domain of popular amusements. That the stones of Assyria resonated in debates far beyond the interests of religious and scientific groups is apparent in the prevalence of poetry, exhibitions, plays, and dioramas inspired by the excavation. Of particular note, correspondence involving high-ranking diplomatic personnel and museum officials demonstrates that the 'treasures' brought home to fill the British Museum served not only as signs of symbolic conquest, but also as covert means for extending Britain's political and economic influence in the Near East. Malley takes up issues of class and influence to show how the middle-class Layard's celebrity status both advanced and threatened aristocratic values. Tellingly, the excavations prompted disturbing questions about the perils of imperial rule that framed discussions of the social and political conditions which brought England to the brink of revolution in 1848 and resurfaced with a vengeance during the Crimean crisis. In the provocative conclusion of this meticulously documented and suggestive book, Malley points toward the striking parallels between the history of Britain's imperial investment in Mesopotamia and the contemporary geopolitical uses and abuses of Assyrian antiquity in post-invasion Iraq.

Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.