{"product_id":"9781501784941","title":"Seeing Things : Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture","description":"\u003cp\u003eA cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries, Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies - magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics - an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe popularization of Victorian optical media redefined visuality as a rational mode of spectatorship that taught audiences to distinguish illusion from reality. As an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe, to be entertained without being deceived, it became a sign of western supremacy. By tracing the development of virtual aesthetics through nineteenth-century writings, from the novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens to popular science writing and imperial travelogues, Seeing Things recovers a formative period of technological and literary innovation to explain how optical media not only anticipated cinema but became a paradigmatic media aesthetic of western modernity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45367205462095,"sku":"00000_00000_00000_00000","price":1223.0,"currency_code":"TWD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/kinokuniya.com.tw\/products\/9781501784941","provider":"Books Kinokuniya Taiwan","version":"1.0","type":"link"}