Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (review)

The title of Nancy Armstrong's book suggests that there was a relationship between photography and literature, especially the genre of nineteenth-century British realism. Although both photography and realism are recurring themes in the book, there is no systematic analysis of their relationship. Instead, Armstrong offers an analysis of the role of the "image" in literature. These images are not necessarily pictures or photographs, but rather a body of descriptions, both visual and literary, that created distinctions between the various segments of British society and empire between 1780 and 1920.

In the introduction, Armstrong situates herself theoretically among three literatures: the Marxian tradition of cultural criticism, the French psychoanalytic school, and the Anglo-American scholars of identity politics. In doing so she draws on a diverse range of theorists including Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Georg Lukács, and Karl Marx. She uses this theoretical overview to outline her concept of the image and how it relates to British fiction. The core analytical chapters follow this introduction in roughly chronological order.

Five of the six chapters of Fiction in the Age of Photography were originally published as articles. So each one is self-contained and only occasionally makes reference to previous or future chapters of the book. Chapter 2 is a new essay on William Gilpin and the late eighteenth-century debates about the aesthetic of the picturesque. Chapter 3 discusses Dickens and the evolution of his descriptive style. Armstrong analyzes Bleak House in the context of both early British photography and the struggle for bourgeois cultural hegemony in London. Armstrong's fourth chapter focuses on internal colonialism and realism in the British Isles. In this section she contrasts Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights with popular photographs depicting people in regional costumes and genre scenes. Armstrong extends and complicates her analysis of colonialism by looking at the role of gender in Alice in Wonderland and King Solomon's Mines. The final chapter is devoted to a discussion of the art photography of Stieglitz and the literary modernism of Joyce.

Armstrong's analysis of these diverse topics is interesting, but tends to leave the reader with more questions than she answers. For example, just as she seems to be getting into a detailed analysis of the Victorian relationship between technology and the pseudoscience of physiognomy, Armstrong drops in a rhetorical non sequitur, "Photography failed to provide a basis for induction" (126) and then moves on to another topic. The reader is left wondering what the empirical foundations are for this statement and what the implications are for the rest of the book. Instead of imparting that aura of knowing play and difference sought after by most postmoderns, the statement simply undermines the authority of Armstrong's analysis.

Historians of technology and film studies scholars will disagree with some of Armstrong's findings. For example, in her introduction, she decides to put William Henry Fox Talbot forward as the inventor of photography on the grounds that he had created a process that used a negative capable of making multiple prints. Furthermore, according to Armstrong, Talbot and the photographers using his technique "established the format, the kind of subject matter and the aesthetic issues that would be popularized by the new medium" (12). A combination of technical sophistication and popularity made Talbot the founder of photography as an aesthetic genre. This seems reasonable enough, except that Armstrong then admits that Talbot's process was almost immediately eclipsed by F. Scott Archer's wet collodion process (14). So, like the daguerreotype, the calotype's popularity barely lasted a decade. In light of this brevity and the priority of Daguerre's method, the grounds for considering Talbot the founding father of photographic aesthetics are thin. As has been suggested by Walter Benjamin and Jonathan Crary, whom Armstrong cites, the development of photography was a larger social project, subject to broader...