Picturing the Reader
Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century
Summary
The long nineteenth century saw a prolific increase in the number of books being produced and read and, consequently, in the number of visual and textual discourses about reading. This collection examines a range of visual and textual iconographies of readers produced during this period and maps the ways in which such representations engaged with crucial issues of the time, including literary value, gender formation, familial relationships, the pursuit of leisure and the understanding of new technologies.
Gauging the ways in which Victorians conceptualized reading has often relied on textual sources, but here we recognize and elaborate the importance of visual culture – often in dialogue with textual evidence – in shaping the way people read and thought about reading. This book brings together historians, literary scholars and art historians using a range of methodologies and theoretical approaches to address ideas of readership found in fine art, photography, arts and craft, illustration, novels, diaries and essays. The volume shows how the field of readership studies can be enriched and furthered through an interdisciplinary approach and, in particular, through an exploration of the visual iconography of readers and reading.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the authors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction (Beth Palmer and Amelia Yeates)
- Part I Framing the Reader
- 1 Framing Reading in Mary Watts’s Diaries and Designs (Beth Palmer)
- 2 Reading Like a Victorian: How the Book Review Illuminates Viewing as an Essential Part of Reading (Catherine J. Golden)
- 3 Picturing the Poor: Reader Spectatorship, Sympathy and Slumming in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (Garth Wenman-James)
- Part II Visual Representations of Readers
- 4 Painting the ‘Woman as Reader’: From Romney to Rossetti (Colin Cruise)
- 5 ‘No Happy Wearing of Beloved Leaves’: Women and Not Reading in Nineteenth-Century Art* (Amelia Yeates)
- 6 In Search of ‘Some Bond of Union’: Picturing the Domestic Reading Circle in Victorian Photographs (Charlotte Boman)
- Part III The Reader in the Text
- 7 Interrogating the Male Reader in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (Ashton Foley-Schramm)
- 8 Picturing the Reader in Jane Austen’s Novels (Katie Halsey)
- Afterword (Mary Hammond)
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Series Index
Illustrations
Figure 3.2.William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751. The British Museum.
Figure 5.2.William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853, Photo © Tate.
←viii | ix→Figure 5.3.William Holman Hunt, Il Dolce far Niente, 1859–1866, Private Collection, Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.
Figure 5.4.Charles Wynne Nicholls, On the Beach, 1867, Scarborough Museums Trust.
Figure 6.6.R. H. Mason, ‘Charles Dickens’, 1865, © National Portrait Gallery, London.
←ix | x→Figure 7.2.‘Talboys Gazing at Lady Audley’s Picture’, London Journal, 37.948 (11 April 1863). Images published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the British Association for Victorian Studies for funding the symposium from which this collection grew. We would also like to thank the School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey and the School of Creative and Performing Arts at Liverpool Hope University for their support of this project. Funding for image rights and reproductions has also come from the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey. We are grateful to the individuals and institutions who have granted permissions for use of the images featured in this book.
Each contributor will have their own colleagues and networks who have offered support and advice along the way. The editors particularly wish to thank Lucy Ella Rose and Tessa Kilgariff for fruitful conversations, feedback and guidance along the way. We wish, most of all though, to thank our contributors for their hard work, insight and patience during the time it has taken this book to come together.
Beth Palmer and Amelia Yeates
Introduction
In 1896 Henri Matisse exhibited his painting Woman Reading (1894) at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars. The subject of the painting is seated with her back to us, apparently engrossed in her book, the world around her unheeded. Readers, especially female readers, have frequently been used as painterly subjects from the medieval period onwards. Matisse’s early painting seems to offer us the same provocations that many such paintings do: the inaccessibility of the subject’s thoughts, the seeming contrast between the still image and the depicted mental activity, the complex relationship between the single moment in time captured in the painting, and the ongoing narrative time symbolized by the open book. Here, however, Matisse does something else too. The reading woman is turned away from the viewer, facing the corner of the room, not orientating herself towards the window but towards a range of art objects placed on a chest or small cupboard. The surface of this chest she faces is cluttered with statuettes and the sculptural and decorative forms of vases, while the walls are hung with framed paintings or prints. A seemingly unfinished painting is propped against the chest, suggesting the subject herself is a painter. Here, the act of reading and the acts of art appreciation (and production) rub comfortably against one another. Reading is not solipsistic but oriented – at interesting angles – towards the visual and decorative arts. The textual is not privileged over the visual; how can it be when to decipher black forms on a white page is an inherently visual act? Matisse would go on to render women reading in numerous paintings throughout his career, but this early work provides one way into some of the issues and questions this collection attempts to address. Why and how is reading and readership represented in visual and literary arts? And how do texts of all kinds ←1 | 2→understand and explore the role of the visual in activating readerships? This collection poses questions around the type of ‘reading’ or visual apprehension involved in looking at paintings and illustrations and also the ways in which texts might employ strategies borrowed from the visual arts. We consider what happens when illustration and text share the page. And we move away from the printed text itself to consider other forms in which reading appears visually, such as fine art and photography, asking what is the significance of the reader as subject across various art forms. We think too about the situatedness of the reading experience, both in time and in space. What role do the aesthetics of the reading space play in enhancing or detracting from the text being read? These, and further, interconnected questions are elaborated by our contributors in the following chapters. This book, however, does not attempt to provide definitive answers to these questions. Rather, we seek, through these studies ranging across textual and visual arts and throughout the nineteenth century, to provoke further thought and research around reading and its many engagements with a broadly conceived understanding of the visual.
Details
- Pages
- XIV, 270
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781788747134
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781788747141
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781788747158
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781788747127
- DOI
- 10.3726/b14839
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (May)
- Keywords
- Reading and readership Long nineteenth century Interdisciplinary and archival Beth Palmer Amelia Yeates Picturing the Reader
- Published
- Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2022. XIV, 270 pp., 8 fig. col., 24 fig. b/w, 2 tables.
