Books

 

cover of book

Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (University of Michigan Press, 2012) connects the Victorian fascination with “virtual travel” with the rise of realism in 19th-century fiction and 21st-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the 19th century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of “virtual travel” reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and 21st-century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.

“Railway carriages are likened to chat rooms, balloonists encounter a ‘SimCity’ view of the metropolis, and the associative yet disconnected episodes of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat resemble ‘links in a blog.’… Byerly’s wide-ranging and strenuously researched survey.. stakes out an intriguing basis from which to analyze the ‘indeterminacy’ inherent in the realist project.”      —Times Literary Supplement

“Byerly is chock-full of new materials brought into view through a fresh perspective straightforwardly grounded in the network-computer concerns of our present. It feels both intuitively right and brilliant.”   —Jonathan H. Grossman, University of California, Los Angeles

Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge Univ Press)

Realism, Representation, and the Arts examines the representation of a variety of arts–primarily painting, theater, and music–within the work of major nineteenth-century novelists. It charts a historical progression, from Romantic poetry, through mid-century Realism, to Aestheticism, showing how authors used references to other forms of art to illuminate their own aesthetic ideals. Examining the aesthetic theory and cultural practice of different arts, Byerly demonstrates the importance of artistic representation to the development of Victorian Realism.

“Alison Byerly’s rich, stimulating, wide-ranging, and admirably compact new book raises a provocative set of questions.” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal

“… a persuasive, thoroughly readable, and well-constructed book.” Jennifer Green-Lewis, Victorian Studies

 

 

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