The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination
Fragmentation, Animated Movement and the Modern Episteme
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan
Published:15th Nov '24
Should be back in stock very soon
This book fills a gap in existing scholarship on the history of the novel in relation to visual culture by discussing the visual fascination that novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot show for several types of pre-cinematic spectacle. It also identifies a so far neglected aspect of novel theory that nineteenth-century authors elaborated by incorporating suggestions from pre-cinematic visual spectacles. By shedding light on forms of visuality that were not entertained by the dominant aesthetic modes of painting and photography, The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination argues that the presence of nineteenth century pre-cinematic optical illusions in works of fiction redefines the notion of mimesis as animated movement and points to a continuity between pre-cinema, the literary imagination and the structures of knowledge production of the modern episteme.
“Alberto Gabriele in The Nineteenth Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination continues to advance his case for rethinking the relationship between visuality and the nineteenth-century novel. … while the study sometimes overwhelms with its own type of microscopic analysis of these texts, it nevertheless creates a fuller picture of how nineteenth-century authors deployed these optical tools as modes of pre-modernist experimentation.” (Christian Gallichio, The Victorian Web, victorianweb.org, January 6, 2026)
“The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination, he demonstrates that the early modernist novels have used visual strategies similar to the very first cinematic techniques of representation. ... his volume offers a transdisciplinary exploration of how two different mediums – the visual and the textual – make use of and critique new and classical mimetic tools of the nineteenth century.” (Horațiu Tohătan, Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, Vol. 11 (1), 2025)
ISBN: 9781349961160
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
246 pages
2024 ed.