Archaeologies of Visual Culture: Gazes, Optical Devices and Images from Xviith to Xxth Century Literature (Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities)

This book analyzes different historical and cultural staging of gazes, otpical devices and images in the context of a discipline that goes by the name of visual culture. Here literary studies have contaminated and thus expanded their original field of investigation not only addressing, as in the past, the question of the relationship between verbal and visual, but also giving substance to this interweaving with an in-depth questioning about the meaning gazes, images and vision devices or, more generally, the visual media can have on literature. This research tries to define the ways in which changing cultures have addressed these questions; in particular in which ways English early modern culture, German nineteenth century fantastic, and French twentieth century natural ekphrasis have done it. This book analyzes the interviewing of gazes, optical devices and images in literature. Literary theory has expanded its original field of investigation addressing not only the traditional relationship between the visual and the verbal, but questioning about the influence that gazes, optical devices and images can have on literary texts. This research tries to define the way in which diverse cultures have addressed the question of the scopic regimes of modernity: the gazes of English early modern women writers, the optical devices in the German literature of the age of Hoffmann, and the natural images described by twenty century French authors.