by Jon Lackman | 17 October 2006 | Books, Theory
In CAA Reviews, Jill H. Casid reviews The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, edited by Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski: “Sensitive to charges that visual culture studies is an amorphous and ever-expanding field without either a clearly defined object of study or rigorous research and analytical methods, the first section of the reader on the practice of visual culture studies relative to established humanities, science, and social science disciplines features three new essays that set out to define and shape the field as a historical discipline with a historical consciousness. Focusing on vision and visuality while emphasizing the need to situate seeing in relation to the other bodily senses, the essays also define visual culture as an ‘interdisciplinary mode of analysis’ and a ‘concrete inventory of objects, institutions, and historically located observers’ … the Reader is distinct in the argument it makes for the importance of the nineteenth century to the field of visual studies. While there are certainly active professional associations, journals, and book series in interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, there is no other interdisciplinary nineteenth-century collection that focuses so centrally on the visual. However, this restricted attention to the nineteenth century is also the Reader’s weakness. Although the Reader’s temporal parameters from the very end of the eighteenth century to the beginning decades of the twentieth contribute to the volume’s coherence, the continued location of modernity in the nineteenth-century West is at odds with the Reader’s efforts to include studies informed by postcolonial critique.”
