The Victorians and the Visual Imagination

by Kate Flint

This innovative, interdisciplinary study explores the Victorians' attitudes toward sight. It draws on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as pre-Raphaelite and realist painters including Millais, Burne-Jones, William Powell Frith and Whistler, and a host of Victorian scientists, cultural commentators and art critics. Topics discussed include blindness, memory, hallucination, dust, and the importance of the horizon--a dazzling array of subjects linked together by the operations of the eye and brain. This richly illustrated book will appeal to anyone studying Victorian culture.

Genres: Art, History, 19th Century, Criticism

Hardcover

First published August 28, 2000

About the author

Kate Flint is Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California. With an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute and a B.A. and D.Phil. from Oxford University, she previously taught at Rutgers, Oxford, and Bristol universities. Her areas of specialization include Victorian and early twentieth-century cultural, literary, and visual history. She’ author of Flash! Photography, Writing and Surprising Illumination (2017); The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930 (2008); The Victorians and The Visual Imagination (2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (1993). These last two books both won the British Academy’ Rose Mary Crawshay prize. She has previously held an ACLS Fellowship, and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library. She’ currently President of the North American Victorian Studies Association.