Science and Visual Culture in Great Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century

Science and Visual Culture in Great Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Diana Donald
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 582
Release: 2024-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040118720

This volume consists of a collection of primary sources throwing light on the various aspects of interplay between zoology and visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. Scientific illustration, both in specialist studies and in works intended for a broader lay readership, are included. These sources throw light on the difficulties of both authors and illustrators in conceptualising their subjects in visual forms, given the great extension of knowledge of the natural world and the technical complexities of image-making in the pre-photographic era. The study examines the impact of zoological knowledge and theories on imaginative art, and explores the aestheticisation and appropriation of nature, especially in relation to bird imagery in painting, illustration and the decorative arts. Finally, the collection examines the presentation of zoology and palæozoology to the general public, for both education and entertainment purposes. This title will be of great interest to students of the History of Science and Art History.

Victorian Science and Imagery

Victorian Science and Imagery
Author: Nancy Rose Marshall
Publisher: Sci & Culture in the Nineteent
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780822946533

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories--such as Darwin's theory of evolution and sexual selection--deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

Visualizing Equality

Visualizing Equality
Author: Aston Gonzalez
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-07-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469659972

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Author: Laurence Talairach
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2021-05-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030725278

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties explores the relationship between the zoological and palaeontological specimens brought back from around the world in the long nineteenth century—be they alive, stuffed or fossilised—and the development of children’s literature at this time. Children’s literature emerged as dizzying numbers of new species flooded into Britain with scientific expeditions, from giraffes and hippopotami to kangaroos, wombats, platypuses or sloths. As the book argues, late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian children’s writers took part in the urge for mass education and presented the world and its curious creatures to children, often borrowing from their museum culture and its objects to map out that world. This original exploration illuminates how children’s literature dealt with the new ordering of the world, offering a unique viewpoint on the construction of science in the long nineteenth century.

Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America

Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America
Author: Ann R. Hawkins
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438485565

A vital part of daily life in the nineteenth century, games and play were so familiar and so ubiquitous that their presence over time became almost invisible. Technological advances during the century allowed for easier manufacturing and distribution of board games and books about games, and the changing economic conditions created a larger market for them as well as more time in which to play them. These changing conditions not only made games more profitable, but they also increased the influence of games on many facets of culture. Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America focuses on the material and visual culture of both American and British games, examining how cultures of play intersect with evolving gender norms, economic structures, scientific discourses, social movements, and nationalist sentiments.

Peoples on Parade

Peoples on Parade
Author: Sadiah Qureshi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2011-10-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226700968

Examines the phenomenon of human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain and considers how this legacy informs understandings of race and empire today.

Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas

Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas
Author: Ernesto Capello
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000228797

During the nineteenth century, gridding, graphing, and surveying proliferated as never before as nations and empires expanded into hitherto "unknown" territories. Though nominally geared toward justifying territorial claims and collecting scientific data, expeditions also produced vast troves of visual and artistic material. This book considers the explosion of expeditionary mapping and its links to visual culture across the Americas, arguing that acts of measurement are also aesthetic acts. Such visual interventions intersect with new technologies, with sociopolitical power and conflict, and with shifting public tastes and consumption practices. Several key questions shape this examination: What kinds of nineteenth-century visual practices and technologies of seeing do these materials engage? How does scientific knowledge get translated into the visual and disseminated to the public? What are the commonalities and distinctions in mapping strategies between North and South America? How does the constitution of expeditionary lines reorder space and the natural landscape itself? The volume represents the first transnational and hemispheric analysis of nineteenth-century cartographic aesthetics, and features the multi-disciplinary perspective of historians, geographers, and art historians.

Fugitive Science

Fugitive Science
Author: Britt Rusert
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1479805726

Honorable Mention, 2019 MLA Prize for a First Book Sole Finalist Mention for the 2018 Lora Romero First Book Prize, presented by the American Studies Association Exposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

Britain's Chinese Eye

Britain's Chinese Eye
Author: Elizabeth Chang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2010-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804775877

This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. Chang brings together an unusual group of primary sources to investigate how nineteenth-century Britons looked at and represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped British writers' and artists' vision of their own lives and experiences. For many Britons, China was much more than a geographical location; it was also a way of seeing and being seen that could be either embraced as creative inspiration or rejected as contagious influence. In both cases, the idea of China's visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real. To better grasp what Romantic and Victorian writers, artists, and architects were doing at home, we must also understand the foreign "objects" found in their midst and what they were looking at abroad.