Books
Picture World (Oxford University Press, 2020) studies the new visual media of the nineteenth century. Each chapter uses a new kind of picture to reconceive a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics.
The book approaches “character” via the caricatures and cartoons in the mass press of the 1830s; “realism” via pictorial journalism; “illustration” via illustrated Bibles; “sensation” through carte-de-visite portrait photographs; “the picturesque” by way of stereoscopic views; and “decadence” through advertising posters.
Each chapter also tracks the afterlives of these objects into our present-day media world—from Bible-themed amusement parks, to 3D films like Avatar, to the photo albums of Facebook.
Picture World was awarded Honorable Mention by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) for the Best Second Monograph Prize. You can find it on Amazon and Oxford University Press.
The Literate Eye (Oxford University Press, 2009) explores how Victorian writers turned to the visual arts to imagine new modes of living, thinking, and feeling. Their art writing, which gained a huge following, paved the way for later experimental art movements fascinated by form, abstraction, and avant-gardism.
The book studies well-known works by John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde, alongside lesser-known texts drawn from the rich field of Victorian print culture—gallery reviews, scientific treatises, tracts on early photography, even satirical cartoons.
The Literate Eye tracks how Victorian art culture produced the museum worlds of modernism, in a revisionary account that ultimately relocates “the modern” to the heart of the nineteenth century.
The book was awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for Best First Book in Victorian Studies in 2010. You can find it at Amazon and Oxford University Press.