Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Seeing the Big Picture
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Beschreibung
This book shows how in nineteenth-century Britain, confronted with the newly industrialized and urbanized modern world, writers, artists, journalists and impresarios tried to gain an overview of contemporary history. They drew on two successive but competing conceptual models of overview: the panorama and the compilation. Both models claimed to offer a holistic picture of the present moment, but took very different approaches. This book shows that panoramas (360° views previously associated with the Romantic period) and compilations (big data projects previously associated with the Victorian fin de siècle) are intertwined, relevant across the entire century, and often remediated, making them crucial lenses through which to view a broad range of genre and forms. It brings together interdisciplinary research materials belonging to different period silos to create new understandings of how nineteenth-century audiences dealt with information overload. It argues for a new politics of distance: one that recognizes the value of immersing oneself in a situation, event or phenomenon, but which also does not chastise us for trying to see the big picture. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, visual culture and information studies.
Helen Kingstone is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her first book, Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. She co-chaired a Wellcome Trust-funded Humanities and Social Sciences network on ‘Generations’ from 2019 to 2021, and has been a co-director of the Centre for Research on Ageing and Generations at the University of Surrey.
This book shows how in nineteenth-century Britain, confronted with the newly industrialized and urbanized modern world, writers, artists, journalists and impresarios tried to gain an overview of contemporary history. They drew on two successive but competing conceptual models of overview: the panorama and the compilation. Both models claimed to offer a holistic picture of the present moment, but took very different approaches. This book shows that panoramas (360° views previously associated with the Romantic period) and compilations (big data projects previously associated with the Victorian fin de siècle) are intertwined, relevant across the entire century, and often remediated, making them crucial lenses through which to view a broad range of genre and forms. It brings together interdisciplinary research materials belonging to different period silos to create new understandings of how nineteenth-century audiences dealt with information overload. It argues for a new politics of distance: one that recognizes the value of immersing oneself in a situation, event or phenomenon, but which also does not chastise us for trying to see the big picture. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, visual culture and information studies.
First comparison of the origins and influences of panoramas and collective biography, both popular in the 19th century Shows how these two forms offered overview of the scale of modernity where conventional historiography could not Brings the media theory concept of ‘remediation’ to bear on forms that have been previously seen in isolation
Autor*in
Helen Kingstone
Themen in »Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain«
Romanticism Victorian Literature Epistemology Modernity Dictionary of National Biography Visual art Archives History of photography Remediation Sociology of knowledge
Stimmen zu »Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain«
“In Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing the Big Picture, Helen Kingstone adds to the rich history of scholarship concerning 'panoramic perspective' ... . the emphasis of Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain on the generation of ‘overview through immersion’ develops an invaluable approach to the nineteenth-century’s writing and comprehension of history ... .” (Joe Kember, Victorian Studies, Vol. 67 (1), 2024)
“Kingstone’s study effectively builds on the work of previous scholars – particularly regarding the nineteenth-century panorama – by tying the panoramic perspective … to the notion of writing one’s history. Scholars of the visual and material will find Kingstone’s study a timely intervention in the field, offering a new perspective on how the Victorians saw themselves and their history.” (Michelle Reynolds, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 24 (1), 2024)
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