Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Seeing the Big Picture
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Springer International Publishing AG
Published:7th Jan '23
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£109.99(9783031156861)
This book shows how in nineteenth-century Britain, confronted with the newly industrialized and urbanized modern world, writers, artists, journalists and impresarios tried to gain an overview of contemporary history. They drew on two successive but competing conceptual models of overview: the panorama and the compilation. Both models claimed to offer a holistic picture of the present moment, but took very different approaches. This book shows that panoramas (360° views previously associated with the Romantic period) and compilations (big data projects previously associated with the Victorian fin de siècle) are intertwined, relevant across the entire century, and often remediated, making them crucial lenses through which to view a broad range of genre and forms. It brings together interdisciplinary research materials belonging to different period silos to create new understandings of how nineteenth-century audiences dealt with information overload. It argues for a new politics of distance: one that recognizes the value of immersing oneself in a situation, event or phenomenon, but which also does not chastise us for trying to see the big picture. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, visual culture and information studies.
“Kingstone’s study effectively builds on the work of previous scholars – particularly regarding the nineteenth-century panorama – by tying the panoramic perspective … to the notion of writing one’s history. Scholars of the visual and material will find Kingstone’s study a timely intervention in the field, offering a new perspective on how the Victorians saw themselves and their history.” (Michelle Reynolds, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 24 (1), 2024)
ISBN: 9783031156830
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
275 pages
1st ed. 2022