The Victorians and the visual imagination

"The Victorians and the Visual Imagination is an exciting and innovative exploration of the Victorians' attitudes towards sight. Tantalised by physiologists who proved the unreliability of the eye, intrigued by the role of subjectivity within vision and provoked by new technologies of spectatorship, the Victorians were also imaginatively stirred by the sense of a world which lay just out of human sight. This ground-breaking, interdisciplinary study draws on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as Pre-Raphaelite and realist painters, and a host of Victorian scientists, cultural commentators and art critics. Its topics include blindness, the location of memory, hallucination, dust and the importance of the horizon - a dazzlingly eclectic range of subjects linked together by the operations of the eye and brain. This richly illustrated work of cultural history will make us look freshly at how Victorians saw and interpreted their world."--BOOK JACKET.