Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In the late nineteenth century, the development of a relatively new invention-the moving picture-dramatically changed visual culture. Films not only captured the public imagination, they altered the way the world was represented to and received by the eager viewing audience. This groundbreaking book explores the history of visual media in Britain during this key period, when the nineteenth century was closing and the twentieth just beginning.

Lynda Nead shows in this original study how the period witnessed a transformation from stasis to movement across the entire range of visual media, including painting, photography, and film as well as stage magic, lantern pictures, early film posters, and astronomy. She looks at the effects of this transformation from a wide variety of perspectives, demonstrating how the idea of motion haunted all visual media and altered both viewers' expectations of the image and their modes of perception. Nead portrays a fascinating cultural landscape in the midst of change, filling in the details with a rich selection of illustrations.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Art historian Nead (Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London) here expands on her past scholarship (Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain; Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London), exploring the impact of the moving image across visual media in fin de siecle Britain. Following the precedent of art historian Jonathan Crary's analyses of technological, psychological, and perceptual histories of modern vision--Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (2000)--Nead incorporates an exhaustive list of scientific and cultural events that helped shape the cinematic impulse of the period. To tell this story, she unearths colorful and overlooked case studies, such as that of social realist painter and car enthusiast Hubert von Herkomer. From fairgrounds to Freud, peep shows to Proust, few references are left unexplored. While this democratic breadth is admirable, it can also overwhelm the casual reader. At these moments, the rich and unusual illustrations provide happy relief. Nead's book picks up in its second and more original half, with interesting chapters on how new visual technologies relate to mass sexual imagery and on the projected image's connection to astronomy and spectral phenomena. Recommended for art history or visual studies collections.--Prudence Peiffer, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.