Visible Histories: Print Culture and the Reproducible Past in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Ghosts, resemblances, ruins, paintings, and other visual phenomena in nineteenth-century British novels often illustrate the otherwise invisible past. As new media technologies expanded the mass production of images during the nineteenth century, representing earlier time as visible helped novelists to affirm its reality, power, and difference from the present. Distinguishing between the past (prior time) and history (the representation of the past), this project relates historical apparitions in novels by Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde to contemporaneous print media, including illustration, print series, and photography. Against the backdrop of modernizing shifts in popular visual culture, these novelists depict the past as a realm of precarious reality that fiction can uphold, query, or verify by portraying it as a visible reproduction. Their novels disclose bygone events by making them available to sight in images, appearances, and serial variations between bodies that often combine biological and mechanical reproduction, thereby enlarging print-culture notions of reproducibility. These texts make readers, usually already viewers of printed pages, into spectators of fictional worlds by obliging them to agree that narrated histories can be seen. Moments when prior epochs appear before the eyes of fictional characters offer insight into values placed on memory, visual representation, and reproduction. Intimations of former eras in these novels frequently transpire as sights of landscape and so position anterior time as another distant territory that nineteenth-century British expansionism yearned to access. The mnemonic displays in these novels inherit traditions of supernatural fiction and often stand in for fictional ghosts, even as they link print media to spectrality. The physical book itself manifests the haunting presence of earlier worlds and so represents an important symbol of visible history throughout this study. Chapters of the dissertation explore how fictional sights of reproduced time illuminate notions of illustration, Darwin's evolutionary theory, British interests in Palestine, and concepts of mimesis in graphic representation. This interdisciplinary work of literary criticism thus situates the nineteenth-century novel in modern visual culture by examining fictional spectacles in relation to historical spectatorships, tourism, the prehistory of cinema, and the displays of print culture.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0