Through the Negative: The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

by Williams,Megan

• ISBN13: 9780415966733
• ISBN10: 0415966736
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-12
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

"Through the Negative examines how key nineteenth-century American writers attempted to combat, understand, and incorporate the advent of photography in their fiction. In so doing, Megan Williams demonstrates how analyzing the impact of photography on the diverse narrative histories of the nineteenth century yields fresh insights about contemporary art and writing, as the photographic image continues to shape national consciousness.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: Still Narration	1	(14)
One: Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables	15	(24)
Two: Mapping the Literal: The Pastoral Tradition of the Rural Cemetery Movement and Frederick Law Olmsted	39	(22)
Three: Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes: The Cultural Work of the Civil War Photograph	61	(38)
Four: "Sounding the Wilderness": Representations of the Heroic in Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War	99	(30)
Five: Seeing in Circles: The Moving Panorama and Images of a Sanitized History in Mark Twain's Life On the Mississippi	129	(44)
Six: Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage	173	(34)
Epilogue: Foundations of Dust and Stone	207	(12)
Notes	219	(6)
Works Consulted	225	(10)
Index	235