Despite a rich range of varied styles and modes of production of fine arts and crafts during the fin de siècle in Britain, a relatively small set of imagery – the decadent stylings of Aubrey Beardsley, for example – has come to define the age. Drawing on the contemporary idea of the “unity of the arts,” this chapter seeks to expand an understanding of 1890s visuality through the potential of the digital. It first explores the literary/visual/artistic intersections of the 1890s, from Pre-Raphaelite antecedents through the Arts and Crafts movement and book illustration. It then turns to the digital, especially advances in interoperability and rich metadata, to consider the ways that technology can both simulate and illuminate fin-de-siècle artistic intersections, complementing previous modes of thinking about the 1890s while offering a more comprehensive view of the diverse visual culture of the period. Like ideals about the unity of the arts, these new transmedial approaches offer enormous promise but are not without their challenges and limitations.

I have four integrated purposes in Chapter 1. First, it serves as a general introduction to media analysis. I discuss how each medium embodies some set of incentives that systematically select for certain kinds of content. Second, I introduce digital media alongside the other analogous sea changes in the history of communication and culture. I spell out here in new ways the distinctive features that account for the power of digital technology, chiefly that it organizes culture in a new way, that it fuses the functions of medium and tool, that it makes images palpable, that it escapes time and space, that it casts us into the role of customers, and that it occupies our whole field of attention. Third, I am arguing that digital media consequently promotes a certain view of what is worthy of communication and therefore of knowledge and attention. Finally, I make the case that digital technology is in some unprecedented sense “natural.” I mean that it is extraordinarily compelling precisely to the extent that – unlike literacy, which is a hard-earned and laborious achievement – digital technology is arresting and engaging to the exercise of attention as such. It is, as software companies say, “intuitive.”

Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

The turn of the century saw the emergence of a host of different entertainment media through which visual culture was industrialized, commodified, and otherwise modernized. New visual technologies, from photography, moving panoramas, stereoscopes, and cinema, to new image-delivery systems in advertisement and the illustrated press crystalized new forms of social organization and transformed visual perception. Following the modern crónicas of modernista writer Rubén Darío, the article explores the ways in which literary writing faced the challenge of the new mass culture and developed new languages and forms to reach a growing readership in the Latin American modernizing cities. Bridging both sides of the Atlantic and crossing over from the aesthete poet to the popular chronicler, Darío’s writing registers not just the intertwinement of high and mass culture, but above all the forms of spectatorship that delineated “the era of the mechanical reproducibility.”

This chapter examines the relationship between Wallace’s writing and works of visual art. Beginning with the many moments of ekphrasis that punctuate the writing, ranging from myths of tapestry-weaving to Leutze’s mural of Manifest Destiny, encompassing Bernini and Escher in Infinite Jest alone, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace makes use of the language of images in his writing, situating narrative in conversation with visual culture and reaching beyond language to image, color and texture. Reflecting on prior scholarly attention to art positioned in Wallace’s writing, the chapter explores the connections between attention and aesthetic. The chapter also examines the ways in which visual cues appear in other ways in Wallace’s work, from the defecatory art of Brint Moltke in “The Suffering Channel” to the incidence of color as a motif throughout the work, specifically Wallace’s insistent references to clothing. The chapter highlights the materiality of these instances, attending to both the visual and the haptic elements of his narrative deployment of art in fictional worlds. This chapter works in concert with the next, delineating the intermediate nature of Wallace’s writing, poised between language, sense and image, and how his inclusion and occlusion of art recalibrate and reflect the relationships between author and reader.

“The Article” looks at newspaper accounts of lynching through the lens of print, visual, media, and material culture. This materialist lens draws particular attention to the production and circulation of newspaper accounts. Further, this chapter conceptualizes the broader issues of memory, absence, and narrative in the use of newspaper articles as historical primary sources.

This chapter examines another form of conventional historical source through a material culture lens by considering a letter written in 1898 by a former Fusionist supporter and the father of Emma Hartsell. Hartsell was the alleged cause of Kizer and Johnson's lynching, and her father's letter defended the lynching as a necessary corrective to his own former political beliefs. This chapter puts the letter in two broader contexts: the white supremacist political campaign of 1898, and the built environment of media in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century South. In particular, the chapter juxtaposes various landscape texts, such as notes left on lynched bodies and commerical advertising on buildings, to conceptualize broader printed and built cultures of white supremacy.

This essay focuses on an archive of nineteenth-century visual images used to protest slavery and claim US citizenship for a group of Black individuals who previously had been denied it. One goal of picturing race in the nineteenth century in illustrated books, almanacs, print publications, paintings, pamphlets, and photography was not only to show the harms of slavery, but also to confer a type of symbolic citizenship onto African Americans, whether free or enslaved, that could be taken into the postbellum era. Yet especially before the war, illustrated works by white abolitionists often replicated binaries in which African Americans were continually in need of a white viewer’s assistance, whereas works by some African Americans undermined ideas of empathy and portrayed African Americans as exhibiting agency and self-determination. Black abolitionists such as Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth used visual works to complicate flat portrayals of African American identity, and to play with the notion that such works created truth and captured their subjectivity. Their sophisticated manipulation of visual images exists as a contrast to the dominant culture’s practice of surveilling the bodies of the enslaved and configuring African Americans – whether enslaved or free – as passive and abject.

Chapter 7, “Sexing Visual Culture,” critically addresses the history of representations of sex and sexuality in visual culture, from erotic woodblock prints to film to contemporary popular art. The nation-builders of the late nineteenth century considered erotic prints – along with a number of customs, festivals, and rituals that centered on the celebration of fertility, potency, and nudity – as injurious to public morals and thus unfit for the modern civilized nation Japan aspired to become. Later debates regarding “pornography” occasionally pitched both the freedom of sexual expression and “sexual liberation” against aggressive reproductive policies, middle-class morality, and persisting patriarchal conventions. Today, the political and social weight of sexual expression and its social implications continue to be debated. Where some critics see the emergence of the powerful, sexed, ever-transforming, and transformative female in new manga, anime, and popular art, others conceive of such as merely new iterations of the old exploitation of female sexuality designed to fuel and satisfy primarily heteronormative male desire.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.

The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and criminology, and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality was imbricated with print. Autumn Womack approaches visuality in the Anglo-African Magazine through its statistical essays in order to contend that the magazine was brokering a transition from a text-based articulation of Black freedom to one figured in and through visuality. The “visual grammar” that resulted, she argues, presented Black freedom as accomplished and aspirational. Womack thus further elaborates the scholarly contention that Black American practitioners of visuality ranged beyond those using photography, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, to those debating the visual’s affordances in written texts, including Martin Delany, William J. Wilson, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Louisa Picquet, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. She argues that the Anglo-African Magazine explored and reframed the conceptual and visual dimensions of Black freedom by pursuing what optic strategies and practices it both demanded and engendered.

The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and to an understanding of mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as a media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality and its imbrication with print were also mobilized by Black authors to contest those racializing scripts through authorial frontispieces. The mid-century explosion of slave narrative publication and the popularization of photographic portraiture are coincident and imbricated, making visuality and viewing practices central to understanding African American autobiographical texts. In this chapter, Michael Chaney focuses on “ex-fugitive” authorial frontispieces between 1850 and 1854 within the frame of what he calls “embedded gazing and looking relations” scripted by the illustration and phenomenal success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In doing so, he traces contestations over visual compositions of “the slave” that he argues form “the emergence of an ‘optic American slave’” during a “volatile juncture” for African American pictorial self-representation in print culture. How might, and did, Black authors challenge what Chaney calls a “viral Uncle Tom”?

Focusing on works by two early nineteenth-century African American artists – the Baltimore portrait painter Joshua Johnson and the author of The Blind African Slave (1810) Boyrereau Brinch – this chapter considers the conceptions of racialized selfhood before 1830. What can we learn from the aesthetic surfaces left by a non-white portraitist about whom not much is known, working within the genre of family portraiture? Additionally, this chapter offers a reading of the visual as central to African American textual production in the early nineteenth century. Early Black writers were keen visual theorists. Brinch’s tale “about” memory and blindness has rarely been considered in relation to the critical tradition of visual culture studies; that this has been so has reduced not only our understanding of a specific African American literary text, but also our understanding of the place of the visual in American cultural production full stop. This chapter considers Johnson’s and Brinch’s surfaces and visuality in relation to early nineteenth-century conceptions of selfhood, race, and interior depth.

From the late 1870s Ibsen’s international fame started growing. His plays triggered debates and controversies, and the press followed him closely. His work generated immense public interest, as did his person and personal life, and by 1890 he was firmly established as a European literary celebrity. Nineteenth-century celebrities were – like modern celebrities – first and foremost media personalities. Their fame was promoted and maintained by newspapers, periodicals and magazines and, importantly, by new visual techniques like lithography and photography. This chapter describes how an iconic Ibsen was constructed in cartes de visite and cabinet cards produced in European photo studios during the latter part of the nineteenth century. As Ibsen’s fame grew, his portrait photos, originally meant for promotional use, entered the public sphere and began a life of their own. Eventually, they became collectors’ items to be kept in elaborate albums. After sketching the construction of the icon, the chapter traces its circulation in popular visual culture around 1900. Within the emerging consumer culture, portraits of Ibsen – like those of other celebrities – were printed on postcards and trade cards and used to promote a range of luxury commodities.

This essay discusses a series of links connecting Caribbean literature and the visual arts, paying particular attention to shared conceptual, critical preoccupations and visual vocabularies, as well as rhetorical strategies and aesthetic across art forms. It traces important stages in the ongoing dialogue between literature and art, including the foundational role of interdisciplinary movements, journals, art spaces and collaborations among writers and artists.