Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures (review)

Scholarly interest in material culture has recently turned further toward embodied and phenomenal experience. What unites the essays in this well-crafted, timely, and stimulating collection is their shared concern with the haptic and sensual. In their lucid introduction, which provides a very useful précis of recent scholarship, Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello set themselves against the objectivity of Matthew Arnold's claim that the critic should seek to "see the object as it really is," declaring their preference for "the tangible qualities of media, and for embodied modes of engagement with the practices of viewing, reading, collecting, and being with objects in the nineteenth century" (1).

Illustrations, optics, and objects might seem a disparate combination for a cohesive collection, but studies of print and visual media are probably foremost among the areas that have found the sensual turn a creative and productive approach. Abstract textuality has been superseded by a concern with the reader's engagement with the materiality of the book and page, as constituted through all the features of typography and design. The decorporealised or disciplined gaze has similarly been replaced by an embodied viewer, such that "the experience of looking—whether reading texts or enjoying pictures—is never just visual, but is also tactile, kinaesthetic, fully embodied, and affected by the material properties of the objects we do our looking and reading with" (4-5, emphasis original). Thus, Heather Tilley's essay explores William Wordsworth's suffering with the eye disease, trachoma, and the way that his use of glasses with green lenses might have influenced his concern with blindness and imaginative interiority. The volume's concern with embodiment also feeds naturally into a concern with what readers and viewers do with the books, photographs, and illustrations they engage with, how they make them their own through collecting them or by using them as gateways to imagine themselves differently.

One of the strengths of this collection is that the spread of essays provide contrasting perspectives on several recurrent concerns. One of these is nineteenth-century explorations of the boundaries of visibility and invisibility. In addition to the already mentioned piece by Tilley are those by Sophie Thomas and Lindsay Smith. Thomas explores the intriguing correspondence between the use of Medusa slides in phantasmagoria ghost shows and the ekphrasis of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery" (1824). As the figure for that which one cannot look upon, the Medusa parallels the nature of ekphrasis itself in that a verbal representation of the visual makes the latter something which cannot be seen. Analogous to this is the phantasmagoria, which claimed to make the dead visible; its astonishing ("a-stony" [25]) effect is etymologically linked to the petrification of the Medusa's gaze. Countering the conventional notion of ekphrasis as the transposition of a static form into a more open verbal narrative, Thomas suggests that there is a risk of a Medusa-like petrifaction "should the ekphrastic conjuring act succeed too fully in recreating a static visual object" (36).

Arrested or petrified form is also the subject of Smith's dense but rewarding essay on the way in which the invention of photography retrospectively changed traditions of mimesis. Drawing on Plato, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas, Smith asserts that "the close resemblance to photography of an original invites us to rethink the very concept of 'resemblance' as inherent to a process of mimesis" (68). Comparing the temporality of photography and sculpture in their relationship to an original, Smith teases out the distinctions between representation, imitation, mimesis, and resemblance.

The pleasures of photography are also the subject of Stefano Evanglista's essay on John Addington Symonds's photographic work and his predilection for collecting photographs of the male nude. Following his subjection to homosexual blackmail in London, Symonds left for the more relaxed social and sexual air...