The Emergence of Pre-Cinema

The book investigates the dispersed emergence of the new visual regime associated with nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles in the literary imagination of the previous centuries. Its comparative angle ranges from the Medieval and Baroque period to the visual and stylistic experimentations of the Romantic age, in the prose of Anne Radcliffe, the experiments of Friedrich Schlegel, and in Wordsworth’s Prelude. The book examines the cultural traces of the transformation of perception and representation in art, architecture, literature, and print culture, providing an indispensable background to any discussion of nineteenth-century culture at large and its striving for a figurative model of realism. Understanding the origins of nineteenth-century mimesis through an unacknowledged genealogy of visual practices helps also to redefine novel theory and points to the centrality of the new definition of ‘historicism’ irradiating from Jena Romanticism for the structuringof modern cultural studies.

“Gabriele’s book is an articulate, erudite, and readable contribution to Romantic-era scholarship at the intersection of literary and visual studies in at least two obvious ways: he persuasively demonstrates the long history of the visual in Western Culture, undermining the myth of Romantic rupture, and, having done so—through careful reading of three essential authors of the ‘self-reflexive turn’ from the discourse-network of 1800—contributes greatly to our understanding of how this splitting of signifier from referent emerges with new forms of seeing.” (William S. Davis, European Romantic Review, Vol. 30 (1), 2019)

“This boundary-crossing study deftly traces the aesthetics of seeing from Dante, Shakespeare, and Renaissance painting to the age of Romanticism, demonstrating through close analysis and fascinating illustrations a conception of vision that illuminates the subject-position of the perceiver as much as what is perceived.  The Emergence of Pre-Cinema is an elegant combination of philosophy, science, cultural materialism, and close reading, culminating in strikingly fresh readings of works by Ann Radcliffe and William Wordsworth.  The book will be not only of interest to students of British Romanticism but to all who wish to trace the emergence of modernity in a rich variety of media.” (Clare A. Simmons, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA)

“In this capacious book, Alberto Gabriele ranges widely over European literature and culture to examine the psychological and epistemological reverberations of the visual phenomena of the ‘pre-cinematic’. Moving backwards from nineteenth-century optical toys, into Worsdworth, Ann Radcliffe and Schlegel, Gabriele identifies the pre-cinematic with a self-reflexivity towards mimesis, a modernity that he argues to be evident in various narrative forms. This book sheds new light on the complex and nuanced engagement between literature and the modalities of vision.” (John Plunkett, Associate Professor of English, Exeter University, UK)

Alberto Gabriele is the author of Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism and the forthcoming Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective. He is working on a project on the global circulation of print culture in the 1860s and has been, most recently, a Macgeorge fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.