Disillusioned
Disillusioned

Author: Jordan Bear

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2017-05-30

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0271089261

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How do photographs compel belief and endow knowledge? To understand the impact of photography in a given era, we must study the adjacent forms of visual persuasion with which photographs compete and collaborate. In photography’s early days, magic shows, scientific demonstrations, and philosophical games repeatedly put the visual credulity of the modern public to the test in ways that shaped, and were shaped by, the reality claims of photography. These venues invited viewers to judge the reliability of their own visual experiences. Photography resided at the center of a constellation of places and practices in which the task of visual discernment—of telling the real from the constructed—became an increasingly crucial element of one’s location in cultural, political, and social relations. In Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject, Jordan Bear tells the story of how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. By locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception employed by the leading mid-century photographers within this capacious culture of discernment, Disillusioned integrates some of the most striking—and puzzling—images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework.

Patent Inventions - Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel
Patent Inventions - Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel

Author: Clare Pettitt

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2004-03-11

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0191554901

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Although much has been written about the history of copyright and authorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, very little attention has been given to the impact of the development of other kinds of intellectual property on the ways in which writers viewed their work in this period. This book is the first to suggest that the fierce debates over patent law and the discussion of invention and inventors in popular texts during the nineteenth century informed the parallel debate over the professional status of authors. The book examines the shared rhetoric surrounding the creation of the 'inventor' and the 'author' in the debate of the 1830s, and the challenge of the emerging technologies of mass production to traditional ideas of art and industry is addressed in a chapter on authorship at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Subsequent chapters show how novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot participated in debates over the value and ownership of labour in the 1850s, such as patent reform and the controversy over married women's property. The book shows the ways in which these were reflected in their novels. It also suggests that the publication of those novels, and the celebrity of their authors, had a substantial effect on the subsequent direction of these debates. The final chapter shows that Thomas Hardy's later fiction reflects an important shift in thinking about creativity and ownership towards the end of the century. Patent Inventions argues that Victorian writers used the novel not just to reflect, but also to challenge received notions of intellectual ownership and responsibility. It ends by suggesting that detailed study of the debate over intellectual property in the nineteenth century leads to a better understanding of the complex negotiations over the bounds of selfhood and social responsibility in the period.