Contents

Introduction: Visual Culture in the Victorian Mediascape

1. Character

Flat, Zany, Grotesque: Caricature and the Politics of Character

Early-Victorian Caricature and Personhood

The Political Grotesque: Bodies of the People

Punch: The London Charivari

Blood Sports: Urban Character and Cockney Masculinity

Physiognomy and the New City Types

Pickwick’s Caricatures: Comedy, Violence, Servitude

Going Viral: Character as Commodity

On Minor Aesthetics

2. Realism

Realism’s War Pictures: Reality Effects in the Illustrated Newspaper

Crimea: Modern War, Media War

Reading the Illustrated Newspaper

Descriptive Realism: Surface and Map in the Valley of Death

Authentic Realism: Eyewitnessing and the Special Correspondent

Everyday Realism: War Labor in the Trenches

Conventional Realism: Amputees, Nurses, and other War Types

George Eliot’s Realist War Novel

Our War: War Realism Today

3. Illustration

Orients of the Self: Bible Illustration and the Victorian World Picture

Machine-Made Aura

Theorizing Illustration: Enlightening, Expanding, Remaking

Victorian Bibles: Commodity, History, Palimpsest, Collage

Heterotopias of Time: Archaeology, the Fragment, the Nation-State

Sublime Sword: The Bible as Liberal Epic

Realism and the Biblical Body

Race, Jewishness, Orientalism, Aura

The Persistence of Illustration: Holy Land Experience

4. Sensation

Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Photographed Woman

Making Sensation

Cartes de visite and Mass Portrait Photography

The Girl of the Period

Ghost, Copy, Self: The Woman in White

The Actress, the Diva, the New Public Face

Queen Victoria’s Iconic Visibility

Whiteness and Others: Sensations of Race

Star Culture in Photographic Time

The Technosexual Woman

Sensations in the New Media Commons

5. Picturesque

The Picturesque in the Stereoscope: Nature, Touch, Time

You Are There: Stereoscopy’s Deep View

Technologies of the Picturesque

Prosthetic Eye in the Haptic Landscape

Revisiting Wordsworth’s Virtual Landscape

Ornament and Illusion: Gothic History

Stereoscopic Politics and the Global Picturesque

Tourism, Postcards, and the Kodak Moment

6. Decadence

Consuming Decadence: Advertising and the Art Poster

Visual Cultures of Decadence

Poster History: The Language of the Walls

The Street as Art Gallery

Aubrey Beardsley’s Japanee-Rossetti Girl

Art Poster as Decadent Symbol: The Mobile and Degenerate Art

Philosophies of the Decadent Commodity

Surrealism, Dream, and the Arts of Suggestion

Poster Pantomime: The Theater of the Self

Avant-Gardism and Irony in the Modern Advertisement

Conclusion: Cinema in 1896

Bibliography

Index