DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Seeing the Big Picture

Helen Kingstone author

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:

Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain cover

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