Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920:
Ocular Horizons
Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
978 1 84893 234 0: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 84893 235 7
This book explores the role of vision and the culture of observation in Victorian and modernist ways of seeing. Willis charts the characterization of vision through four organizing principles – small, large, past and future – to survey Victorian conceptions of what vision was. He then explores how this Victorian vision influenced twentieth-century ways of seeing, when anxieties over visual 'truth' became entwined with modernist rejections of objectivity.
Sample pages
Readership
History of Science and Medicine, Literature and Victorian Studies
Contents
Introduction – Ocular Horizons: Vision, Science, Literature
Part I: Small
1 Miscroscopy and Disease: Science, Imagination and the Phantasmagoria
2 Miscroscopy and Disease: Place and Identity in Laboratory Science and Fiction
Part II: Large
3 Optical Shuttering: Percival Lowell, Mars and Authorities of Vision
4 Lowell's Minimum Visible: Wonder, Imagination and Popular Science
Part III: Past
5 Looking as Tourists and Scientists: Amelia Edwards, Flinders Petrie and the Archaeology of the Egypt Exploration Fund
6 Egyptologian Archaeology and Fiction: The Artefact as Thing
Part IV: Future
7 Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini: Optics, Ophthalmology and Magical Performance
8 Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini: Sensation, Spectacle and Spiritualism
Afterword
Reviews
Winner of the 2011 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize
'The history and philosophy of science merge seamlessly with literary studies in this intelligently crafted study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vision. By comparing literary and scientific narratives of visual technologies, Willis uncovers cultural assumptions about the way knowledge works. He stands out as an interdisciplinary scholar who analyzes literature as a source as well as a recipient of learning.' Laura Otis, Emory University
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