The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination

<p>This book fills a gap in existing scholarship on the history of the novel in relation to visual culture by discussing the visual fascination that novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne Herman Melville Honor�� de Balzac and George Eliot show for several types of pre-cinematic spectacle. It also identifies a so far neglected aspect of novel theory that nineteenth-century authors elaborated by incorporating suggestions from pre-cinematic visual spectacles. By shedding light on forms of visuality that were not entertained by the dominant aesthetic modes of painting and photography <em>The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination </em>argues that the presence of nineteenth century pre-cinematic optical illusions in works of fiction redefines the notion of mimesis as animated movement and points to a continuity between pre-cinema the literary imagination and the structures of knowledge production of the modern episteme.</p>