Fiction in the age of photography. The legacy of British realism.

From the "blurb":
"Nancy Armstrong, a well-known literary critic, has contributed a major work to the new field of visual studies. The crossover is significant, for she manages to highlight the complex interplays between work and image, photography and prose, production and reception, in order to show how image-making subtly replaced writing as the grounding of fiction. The pictorial persuasions that she charts in a variety of Victorian genres subtly invert standard notions of both realism and readership. ... "
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"Exploring a dazzling variety of topics - landscape gardening, cartes de visite, folklore, contagious disease legislation, the shift to paper currency, Bleak House, Dorian Gray, Heathcliff, and Alice - Nancy Armstrong pursues a single and original theme: the absolute interdependence of literary realism and the advent of photography in nineteenth-century Britain. Her elegant and compelling account makes it clear that visual studies is more than an interesting new field of study. Rather, it is central to the projects of aesthetic theory and literary history."
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CONTENTS
0 Introduction: What Is Real in Realism? ;
1 The Prehistory of Realism ;
2 The World as Image ;
3 Foundational Photographs: The Importance of Being Esther ;
4 Race in the Age of Realism: Heathcliff's Obsolescence ;
5 Sexuality in the Age of Racism: Hungry Alice ;
6 Authenticity after Photography ;
Notes
Index.
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