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ELT 45 : 1 2002 the period, he provides abundant selections from the four major poets, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and Hopkins. Aware that Wilde's reputation has increased to the point that he should now be regarded as a major Victorian, Nassaar allows multiple pages for Wilde's fiction, essays, dramas, and poetry. From Pater, Nassaar has chosen the fictionalized autobiography "The Child in the House," and from the Renaissance has culled the Preface, the Conclusion, and the essay on Da Vinci. The remaining other major Victorian authors, as one would anticipate, are Carlyle, Mill, Newman and Ruskin—each represented by his most often critically acclaimed works. Yeats and Shaw are missing, but as Nassaar points out, though both had their beginnings in the 1890s, they belong, according to most literary historians, more properly to the twentieth century. In fine, The Victorians can be recommended to undergraduate teachers of the period who often complain of the pressure of classroom time that often makes it impossible to treat in any depth the many minor writers without sacrificing the attention the major figures deserve. G. A. Cevasco ______________ St. John's University Teaching Us How To See Kate Flint. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xvi + 427 pp. $74.95 FAR MORE THAN A HANDBOOK to the representational codes of Victorian narrative painting (though it provides help with that function as well), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination is best understood as several sets of essays, with different approaches, on topics related to what might now be called the Victorians' "visual literacy"—and to our own. In ten richly detailed chapters supported by sixty-eight illustrations , Kate Flint examines the complexities of looking and seeing and recording and interpreting the visible world. Victorian paintings and novels were typically crowded with material details which encode a set of cultural values as well as represent the viewpoint of their creator. In addition, engraving and photography and cheap periodicals spread images to an ever widening public, who learned how people and objects both nearby and abroad were "supposed" to look. Twentieth-century theorists have often identified "accumulation and precise recording of detail" as not only a hallmark of the spirit of realism in art and fiction but also a significant feature of metaphysics, social science, and other 76 BOOK REVIEWS Victorian modes of "reading" the world. At the same time, Victorians also recognized that appearances could be deceptive and made use of that recognition in both art and fiction. The book takes several different points of entry into the questions of visuality in the Victorian imagination. Among its topics are the limits of visibility, the relationship between the seen and the unseen, nineteenthcentury efforts to expose previously concealed physical and social phenomena , and the shift in art critics' language from an emphasis on constructing (or teaching spectators to construct) a coherent narrative to a more broadly aesthetic analysis both of painterly technique and of questions about the psychology of perception. Thus The Victorians and the Visual Imagination is interdisciplinary in the broadest sense: it draws on art, literature, critical theory, social theory, science and philosophy, and considers the most ephemeral nineteenth-century productions as well as those that still challenge our powers of interpretation. Amid this richness, some chapters seemed to me more successful than others, though I presume other readers will make different choices. The chapter on dust ("a paradoxical substance ... associated with disease," a marker of class status but also an equalizer, revealing some secrets only under a microscope yet responsible for the sky's magnificence at sunset) is itself a Victorian tour-de-force of hyper-abundant detail drawn from almost sixty nineteenth-century authorities ranging from Florence Nightingale and Isabella Beeton through scientists such as John Tyndall , to literature by Dickens, Gaskell, Tennyson and so forth. Some of the works could have been discovered (I should think) only with the help of our most recent mode of accessing the otherwise invisible: how would Flint have found Steam Power from House Dust for Electric Lighting and Other Purposes (London: Refuse Disposal Company, 1892) or Dust Ho! and Other Pictures from Troubled Lives without the ability to make...

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