The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination

Fragmentation, Animated Movement and the Modern Episteme

Alberto Gabriele

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781349961160
• eBook ISBN: 9781137561312
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Ut Pre-cinema Poesis—Fragmentation, Animated Movement and the Modern Episteme
• 2. Traces and Origins, Signs and Meanings: Analogy and the Thaumatrope in Melville’s Pierre, Or, the Ambiguities
• 3. The Portraiture of Modern Life: Dioramas, Phantasmagorias, Daguerreotypes and the Unweaving of Narrative and Textuality in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables
• 4. A ‘Corporama of Historical Facts:’ Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and the Pre-cinematic Imagination
• 5. Pre-cinematic Vision and the Modern Episteme of Sympathy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
• 6. Coda: Towards Modernism
• Back Matter