A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945

by Stuart Burrows

Literary critics have traditionally suggested that the invention of photography led to the rise of the realist novel, which is believed to imitate the detail and accuracy of the photographic image. Instead, says Stuart Burrows, photography's influence on American fiction had less to do with any formal similarity between the two media than with the capacity of photography to render American identity and history homogeneous and reproducible. The camera, according to Burrows, provoked a representational crisis, one broadly modernist in character. Since the photograph is not only a copy of its subject but a physical product of it, the camera can be seen as actually challenging mimetic or realistic theories of representation, which depend on a recognizable gap between original and reproduction.Burrows argues for the centrality of photography to a set of writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera--including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale

287 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2008