Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century

Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century

Cook, Susan E.

Paperback

Series: SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Literary CriticismBritish HistoryPhotography History & Criticism

ISBN10: 1438475365
ISBN13: 9781438475363
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Jul 2 2020
Pages: 218
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Argues that the photographic negative gives a new way of understanding Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies as well as reality and representation.

Victorian Negatives examines the intersection between Victorian photography and literary culture, and argues that the development of the photographic negative played an instrumental role in their confluence. The negative is a technology that facilitates photographic reproduction by way of image inversion, and Susan E. Cook argues that this particular photographic technology influenced the British realist novel and literary celebrity culture, as authors grappled with the technology of inversion and reproduction in their lives and works. The book analyzes literary works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Cyril Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, and puts readings of those works into conversations with distinct photographic forms, including the daguerreotype, solarization, forensic photography, common cabinet cards, double exposures, and postmortem portraiture. In addition to literary texts, the book analyzes photographic discourses from letters and public writings of photographers and the nineteenth-century press, as well as discussions and debates surrounding Victorian celebrity authorship. The book's focus on the negative both illuminates an oft-marginalized part of the history of photography and demonstrates the way in which this history is central to Victorian literary culture.

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