Seeing Things

<p><b>A cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries </b><b><i>Seeing Things</i></b><b> tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies--magic lanterns stereoscopes phenakistoscopes museum displays and illusionistic stage magic. </b>Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics--an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there. </p><p>The popularization of Victorian optical media redefined visuality as a rational mode of spectatorship that taught audiences to distinguish illusion from reality. As an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe to be entertained without being deceived it became a sign of western supremacy. By tracing the development of virtual aesthetics through nineteenth-century writings from the novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens to popular science writing and imperial travelogues <i>Seeing Things</i> recovers a formative period of technological and literary innovation to explain how optical media not only anticipated cinema but became a paradigmatic media aesthetic of western modernity.</p>