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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Communication studies
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The Commerce of Vision - Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,285
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The Commerce of Vision - Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Hardcover)
Series: Early American Studies
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he
offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural,
commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the
early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was
manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and
spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to
consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and
advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of
vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within
this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a
physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the
intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an
entirely new understanding of vision. The Commerce of Vision
integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture
studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines
a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the
contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision:
from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians,
from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to
the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from
the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre
paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In
response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans
cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the
same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly
integrated with the machinery of commodity production and
highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent
ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its
theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The
Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in
antebellum America.
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