Works in Progress

Monograph. The Image in the Text synthesizes literary, book, and art history with theoretical work from visual and media studies to study how literary images–verbal, mental, and visual–contributed to the development of a mass visual culture in nineteenth-century America. Illustration, especially literary illustration, is a central part of this story, but this book is not a history of illustration. Rather, it is a study of how intricately the images of nineteenth-century literature, fine art, and illustration were intertwined during the years in which a mass visual culture emerged in the United States. I say “emerged” because the story The Image in the Text tells about the rise of a mass visual culture is different from those told by media, literary, and book historians who attribute it to a series of technological innovations and the market forces of production and consumption that they unleashed. 

Instead, The Image in the Tex identifies several cultural factors or pre-conditions that contributed to a mass visual culture developing from the genteel literary print culture in which it was nested. These include: changes in the meaning and medium of illustration; changes in the relationship of image to medium, especially the transposition of the generational continuity of genteel literary culture from the durability of its medium to the immediacy of the images it transmits; the increasing importance of vantage point as a feature of the mass-mediated image; changes in the materiality of a book and its relationship to cultural capital, especially the decoupling of the materiality of the book from its capacity to signify the cultural capital of gentility; and changes in the visibility of a text and its relationship to cultural capital. These changes are consistent with broader trends within the publication of nineteenth-century literature, which saw not only a substantial increase in illustration, but an acknowledged decrease in the pictorial power of words. Yet, as The Image in the Text shows, these changes began to take shape in a financial climate initially unfavorable to publishing visual images at scale and in advance of the technical innovations so frequently identified as the first steps toward a mass visual culture. The Image in the Text tracks these pre-conditions across its chapters, analyzing the image/text operations of print literature within the context of a variety of nascent forms of mass visual culture in America between 1820 and 1850. These include broadsides, periodicals, books, annuals, newspapers, and children’s literature. 

The publication of The Image in the Text will have several important consequences for literary, art, and media history. First, the book argues against the critical tendency to conceive of media and visual studies independent of literary studies and art history. At the same time, The Image in the Text also demonstrates the importance of media and visual studies to literary and art history. While the book practices the traditional close reading methods of literary studies and art history throughout its pages, one of its central points is the need to decouple our understanding of images from the visual in our historiography. For this reason, The Image in the Text relies on three related but distinct ways of thinking about media, including recent theories of the image, historically inflected media studies, and intermedial studies and media theory, As a result, The Image in the Text promises to create new opportunities for studying nineteenth-century American literature, fine art, and illustration at a moment when each was determining its relationship to an increasingly ephemeral and commodified culture.

Third, the book’s account of the rise of the mass-mediated image uncovers a more symbiotic relationship between genteel literary culture and mass visual culture in the nineteenth-century American context than has been previously recognized. As such, The Image in the Text complicates accounts that find mass visual culture to be democratizing, commodifying, or supplanting nineteenth-century literature and fine art. The book instead reveals how elements of genteel literary print culture would persist within mass visual culture as it developed across the century even as the former attempted to distinguish itself from the latter. Fourth, the practices of looking discussed within The Image in the Text promise to lend additional historical specificity to some of our leading accounts about the emergence of modern visual culture and the formation of a new modern observer. The historical arc of the material under discussion in this book not only coincides with the period during which modern culture became visual, its objects and analysis speak directly to the kinds of transformations in vision, visual culture, and observation that these accounts have discussed. Since The Image in the Text attends to the material practices and historical conditions under which things become visible, it offers scholars valuable, detailed information about viewing practices during the period when image production shifted from patronage to commercial networks of exchange.

Finally, The Image in the Text reveals how the accuracy of a mass-mediated image as it developed across the first half of the nineteenth century was the effect of its image/text operations more than the technical properties of a visual medium. Its chapters show how the inclusion of visual media did not generate this accuracy for readers. Rather, it supplemented the verbal image at this stage in media history in its work to create a vantage point from which an accurate picture of the world could be seen. As a result, the book challenges the emphasis often placed on technical innovations in our accounts of the rise of visual media in the US and elsewhere. By understanding the rise of the mass-mediated image as the possible extension rather than the antithesis of prior literary forms, The Image in the Text reverses our familiar understanding of the relationship between technology and culture—one in which technological innovations drive cultural transformations--by showing how prior cultural forms might generate practices which facilitate (or, alternatively, restrict) the introduction and acceptance of new cultural technologies. In short, The Image in the Text argues that the production of mass-mediated images might have already been inside the text.