The Aesthetic Life of Images in Britain's Machine Age

FAIN: FT-254572-17

Rachel Teukolsky
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

A book-length study on new media technology in Victorian England and its influence on literature and aesthetics.

“New media” today conjures cyberspace, hypertext, and other digital innovations. Yet media invention itself is not new, and every epoch has had to confront the disruptive and transformative effects of new communications technologies. This project looks back to the new visual media of Britain’s nineteenth century, to demonstrate their centrality to Victorian ideas about aesthetics, politics, and visual value. Each of the book’s chapters considers a different kind of emergent visual media object, including pictorial newspapers, stereoscopic views, illustrated bibles, advertising posters, and early film. The book shows how these mass-produced visual objects, usually considered disposable ephemera, in fact offer access to some of the Victorian era’s foundational aesthetic concepts, keywords such as character, illustration, realism, sensation, and the picturesque.

Associated Products

Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Book)
Title: Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media
Author: Rachel Teukolsky
Abstract: _Picture World_ shines a welcome new light onto critically neglected yet fascinating visual objects. It looks to the birth of the modern media world in the nineteenth century, when new industrial techniques generated a deluge of mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations. Each chapter focuses on a different object of new visual media, from pictorial war journalism to the illustrated Bible. The book studies the aesthetic effects of the nineteenth century's media revolution: it uses the relics of a previous era's cultural life to interrogate the Victorian world's most deeply-held values, arriving at insights still relevant in our own media age.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.amazon.com/Picture-World-Image-Aesthetics-Victorian/dp/0198859732
Primary URL Description: Amazon link
Secondary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/picture-world-9780198859734?cc=us&lang=en&
Secondary URL Description: Oxford University Press page
Access Model: Print and Electronic
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0198859734
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Victorian 3D: Virtual Adventures in the Stereoscope (Blog Post)
Title: Victorian 3D: Virtual Adventures in the Stereoscope
Author: Rachel Teukolsky
Abstract: Armchair travel is more popular than ever today, making this an excellent time to explore a key moment in the history of home-bound travel. In the Victorian era, people used a stereoscope to launch themselves on virtual journeys to far-off lands from their own parlors. Users inserted a stereograph, twinned photos of a slightly discrepant image, into the device and then peeped into the eyepiece, where the image leaped into startling three dimensionality. The stereoscope created an immersive you-are-there illusion, a feeling that was pleasurable and even dizzying.
Date: 03/22/2021
Primary URL: https://blog.oup.com/2021/03/victorian-3d-virtual-adventures-in-the-stereoscope/
Primary URL Description: The blog of Oxford University Press
Website: OUPblog

"Visuality" (Article)
Title: "Visuality"
Author: Rachel Teukolsky
Abstract: This short essay studies the paradoxical dual nature of visuality in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, visuality was "the master sense" used to enforce social norms, as exemplified by mug shots and photographs in the colonial archive. On the other hand, though, some artworks portrayed a counter-visuality by which subjects could use visual desire to transgress social hierarchies and conventions. The essay locates both of these visual modes in Charlotte Bronte's novel _Jane Eyre_.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/visuality/5CCE102F0A88A4961DF656F1CF3B5267
Primary URL Description: Journal website
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: _Victorian Literature and Culture_
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

“New Work on Art, Literature, and Mediation in the C19.” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “New Work on Art, Literature, and Mediation in the C19.”
Author: Rachel Teukolsky
Abstract: Presentation and discussion of my book _Picture World_ and Jonah Siegel’s book _Material Inspirations_.
Date: 12/4/2020
Conference Name: CUNY Victorian Seminar (The City University of New York)

“Storytelling in Squares: 19th-Century Art and Media Before Comics.” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Storytelling in Squares: 19th-Century Art and Media Before Comics.”
Author: Rachel Teukolsky
Abstract: The paper explores some surprising and unexpected 19th-century antecedents to the comics medium. While comics historians have focused narrowly on certain graphic artists, they have not looked at a broader revolution in the history of narrative art. The paper examines the tradition of 'storytelling in squares,' by which visual narratives moved from panel to panel or from print to print. This mode of storytelling appeared across 19th-century media: the paper studies painting sequences as well as photographic scenes in the stereoscope. This research emerges from Chapter 1 of _Picture World_, on caricature.
Date: 4/5/2021
Conference Name: American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)

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