Picture World

The modern media world came into being in the nineteenth century, when machines were harnessed to produce texts and images in unprecedented numbers. In the visual realm, new industrial techniques generated a deluge of affordable pictorial items, mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations. These alluring objects of the Victorian parlor were miniaturized spectacles that served as portals onto phantasmagoric versions of 'the world.' Although new kinds of pictures transformed everyday life, these ephemeral items have received remarkably little scholarly attention.

Picture World shines a welcome new light onto these critically neglected yet fascinating visual objects. They serve as entryways into the nineteenth century's key aesthetic concepts. Each chapter pairs a new type of picture with a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics, a familiar term reconceived through the lens of new media. 'Character' appears differently when considered with caricature, in the new comics and cartoons appearing in the mass press in the 1830s; likewise, the book approaches 'realism' through pictorial journalism; 'illustration' via illustrated Bibles; 'sensation' through carte-de-visite portrait photographs; 'the picturesque' by way of stereoscopic views; and 'decadence' through advertising posters. Picture World 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.

Rachel Teukolsky, Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

Rachel Teukolsky is an Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on aesthetics, visual culture, and media history in nineteenth-century Britain. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University with a double major in English and Art History, and subsequently received a PhD in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2009), awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize in 2010 for best first book in Victorian studies.