Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature

Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature explores the prevalence of anamorphic perspective in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Jen Boyle investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive art city and garden design and as a theory and figure in literature political theory and natural and experimental philosophy. Anamorphic mediation Boyle brings to light provided Milton Margaret Cavendish and Daniel Defoe among others with a powerful techno-imaginary for traversing through projective virtual experience. Drawing on extensive archival research related to the genre of practical perspective in early modern Europe Boyle offers a scholarly consideration of anamorphic perspective (its technical means performances and embodied practices) as an interactive aesthetics and cultural imaginary. Ultimately Boyle demonstrates how perspective media inflected a diverse set of knowledges and performances related to embodiment affect and collective consciousness.