A cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries, Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies - magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics - an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there.
The popularization of Victorian optical media redefined visuality as a rational mode of spectatorship that taught audiences to distinguish illusion from reality. As an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe, to be entertained without being deceived, it became a sign of western supremacy. By tracing the development of virtual aesthetics through nineteenth-century writings, from the novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens to popular science writing and imperial travelogues, Seeing Things recovers a formative period of technological and literary innovation to explain how optical media not only anticipated cinema but became a paradigmatic media aesthetic of western modernity.
By:
Amanda Shubert
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781501784941
ISBN 10: 1501784943
Pages: 252
Publication Date: 15 November 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: What Was the Virtual? 1. Magic Panic: The Pedagogy of Disenchantment 2. The Mirror of Ink: Realism, Orientalism, and Vision at a Distance 3. Mountains of Light: The Koh-i-Noor at the Great Exhibition 4. Recalled to Life: Phantasmagoria as the History of the French Revolution 5. Spinning in Place: Trapped in the Moving Picture Machine Epilogue: Arrival of a Train
Amanda Shubert is Teaching Faculty in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
