The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ViSUAL CULTURE READER

edited by Jeannene M. Przyblyski and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Routledge/405 pp./$34.95 (sb).

Editors Schwartz and Przyblyski have assembled an indispensable collection of essays that, in looking backward at the beginnings of visual culture and modernity, envisions new possibilities of visual culture studies. The anthology incorporates seminal thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Georg Simmel while building on these foundations with a new wave of researchers in the field. The essays are organized within well considered, if not surprising, sections such as genealogies, technology and vision, display and the circulation of images, cities, visualizing the past, imagining differences, the personal and the political. In spanning a range of issues with focus and sensitivity to context, the anthology fulfills its ambition to delineate the historical methodology of visual culture studies. Placing visual culture in history sharpens the questions of whether and how the twenty-first century is ushering in forms of visual experience as radically different as those of the nineteenth century.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

CHRIS BURVETT is Director of the Visual Studies Workshop.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group