The recent wave of visual material studies in modernist poetics warrants renewed consideration of the means by which Lowell engaged, resisted, and reflected on photographic practices. Lowell’s photographic modes vary with shifting styles and subjects. Early in his career, Lowell invokes photographs and snapshots as material artifacts in portrait and self-portrait genres. In this mode, the surface of the photograph collects descriptive details that rhetorically situate the “record of a life” as one that, Lowell insists, must be believed to be “true,” and “real,”although obviously manipulated. Photography also functions as a metaphor for putting the photographic looking “on stage” to examine different ways of seeing. In later work, epistemologies of photography become models for the action of poetic autobiography and for performances of writing. Connections between photography and poetic practice are considered in autobiographical prose and major poems in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and Day by Day.

Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

When Lev Tolstoy died in 1910, he was a literary celebrity, famous well beyond the borders of his native Russia. His death became one of the first truly international media events of the twentieth century. But the public hunger for images of the great man was already prominent much earlier in his life, when both commissioned and unsolicited portraits and photographs proliferated, creating an international Tolstoy iconography. Throughout the twentieth century, artists, filmmakers, and writers attempted to create their own vision of Tolstoy, either embracing or opposing, but always engaging with, this visual canon. This chapter discusses Tolstoy as a subject of art in painting, cinema, and the theatre, exploring the impact of celebrity-generated images on his representation in these media. First, it focuses on well-known portraits and sculptures of Tolstoy, from Ilya Repin’s famous paintings to Oleg Kulik’s playful installations, as well as controversial frescoes and advertising images. It then moves on to chart a very short history of Tolstoy’s appearance on film, first as a celebrity and then as a character. The final part of the chapter discusses Tolstoy’s postmodern afterlives in the works of Viktor Pelevin and in contemporary Russian theatre.

Representing Samuel Johnson, whose towering intellect and larger than life persona dominated his era, posed a challenge for portrait painters and caricaturists alike. His public image, which coalesced over several decades, has continued to mutate and proliferate long after his death. Expanding the idea of serial portraiture, this chapter examines pairs or clusters of related images across various artists and media, focusing on the formative function of Johnson’s portraits in and after life and their central role in mythologizing him as a literary colossus. This chapter is particularly interested in tracing how visual representations of Johnson morphed over time, were appropriated and reproduced, and interacted dialogically, creating a kaleidoscopic, multifaceted, complex portrait of Johnson. As his close ties with artists, his support of artistic institutions, his print collection, and his collaboration in the creation of numerous portraits amply demonstrate, Johnson was not the ignorant philistine disinterested in his image that he at times

professed to be.

Chapter 3 charts the prevalence of physical description in Senecan tragedy, arguing that this is not a symptom of Rezitationsdrama, but a consequence of Seneca’s interest in physiognomy and pathogonomy, both of which use bodily signals to evaluate the quality of people’s internal psychological / emotional / mental states. Like coherence and exemplarity, physiognomic analysis unites the quasi-personal and purely fictional elements of character, on the one hand by encouraging audiences to infer a psychology behind characters’ surfaces, and on the other by focusing attention on textual signs and symbols. This chapter discusses the confluence of bodily and mental states in Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus.

In and after 1819, particularly after Peterloo, support for radical change among disfranchised Londoners broadened.The conspirators themselves were ‘ordinary Britons’.In no senses part of the ‘mob’, they were craftsmen with families who were losing craft status and income in the worsening post-war economy. Many had the common disabilities of the poor, but Wivell’s extraordinary prison portraits show their common humanity. Most were shoemakers, a craft that was famously literate, thoughtful, and radical.

The chapter charts what we know of Thistlewood’s early Lincolnshire years, his character and appearance, his gentlemanly status and modest wealth, his fecklessness and gambling, the birth of his illegitimate son Julian, and his marriages – particularly to Susan, who stayed with him to the end.It follows his increasing radicalisation after the family’s arrival in London in 1811 and his joining Evans’s Society of Spencean Philanthropists in 1814.

This chapter looks at what the author calls a “system of visual communication” in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. It focuses on “portrait concepts,” which refers to the double process of inventing an ideological image of the king’s public body, on the one hand, and maintaining the conventions of particular visual media, the interests of the composer, and the expectations of the recipients, on the other. The portrait concept thus encapsulates communication and exchange before it reaches the viewer’s eyes. Von den Hoff identifies three different periods in terms of their visual systems of communication. Between 323 and 280 BCE, during the Wars of Succession, there was close entanglement between Ptolemaic and Seleucid portrait concepts. They drifted apart in the subsequent period (280–160) due to dynamically changing local challenges. In the final period (160/40 to c. 100), there was a renaissance of earlier types of portraiture. The author’s emphasis on imperial entanglement in the first period, diversification in the second, and historicizing endeavors in the final period raises questions about the local background to which the visual representation of the kings responded.

Marie d’Agoult was famous in her own time as the lover of Franz Liszt and the mother of his children, one of whom, Cosima, married Richard Wagner. After her separation from Liszt, she made a career for herself as a femme de lettres and wrote a three-volume History of 1848 which was greatly admired by contemporaries including Flaubert who used it as a key source in the writing of Sentimental Education. Carefully researched, elegantly structured, and impressive for its nuanced judgments, her History communicates brilliantly the perspective of the democratic republicans who led the revolution at the outset. These were people who had devoted themselves for twenty years to the emancipation of the “proletariat” but found themselves supporting the crushing of the June insurrection on the ground that, however justified it may have been, it was an attack on the republic. After December 2 d’Agoult’s salon became for a decade a meeting place for liberals opposed to Napoleon III. Finally, she was willing to settle for a conservative republic, not unlike that imagined by Lamartine and briefly led by Cavaignac.

This essay examines how in editions, on the stage, and in biographies, Jonson was revised and reinterpreted for the eighteenth century, generally as a foil to Shakespeare. The first illustrated Jonson was published in 1716, with the plays for the most part represented as if on a modern stage, though few had been performed since the early seventeenth century. Portraits of Jonson too went through much revision, even at one point substituting a slim, youthful, lively poet for the heavyset middle-aged scholar of the previous century. Critical treatments of the playwright were ambivalent, even maintaining that the role he conceived for himself, and that best expressed his character, was that of Morose in Epicene. David Garrick made the roles of Kitely in Every Man in His Humour and Drugger in The Alchemist particularly his own, with the latter even spawning a series of tobacconist sequels. But these productions rebalanced the plays around star performances and increased their sensationalism and emotional temperature. In print, portraits, and performance Jonson was not afforded the same care and respect that were lavished on Shakespeare and was increasingly overshadowed by him.

For generations the conventional “roadside drama” reading of the General Prologue, despite or even because of its undeniable explanatory efficiency, has made it difficult for critics trying to view the Prologue as an object of analysis to view the whole of it. In its construction, Chaucer teases readers with the expectations evoked by the conventional genres of the dream-vision and the estates satire, dangling their promises but leaving them unfulfilled, and uses their features while rejecting their premises and withholding the normal modes of their action. Ultimately what is most distinct about the achievement of the General Prologue is how successfully it seems to ward off grasp of its artifice, organizing the experience of reading to make it seem an experience of something prior to reading.

chapter considers a set of photographs by Martin Laroche made in connection to performances of Richard II in the 1850s. I examine the context for these photographs within the history of photography, as commercial, staged photographs, produced shortly after a high-profile lawsuit had highlighted the tension between scientific and theatrical uses of the medium. I also approach them within their context in the history of Shakespeare performance, suggesting that photography played a key role in the development of ‘antiquarian’ approaches to the history plays in the Victorian period, especially in the work of Charles Kean.

Moving away from formal performance contexts, this chapter considers the act of posing for a photograph as a kind of performance, which can be morally and emotionally engaged. I focus on the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose images show models taking on Shakespearean characters in complex and ambivalent ways. The chapter considers Cameron’s engagement with Shakespeare in comparison to that of some of her contemporaries, including William Holman Hunt, Clementina Hawarden, Henry Peach Robinson, and George Frederic Watts. The final part of the chapter emphasises the instability of Shakespearean identities in the afterlives of Cameron’s works, showing how her image Iago Study from an Italian has accumulated biblical and Dickensian associations in addition to its Shakespearean caption.

With literacy rising but still low, it was through the visual arts that millions of nineteenth-century Russians encountered new thinking about personhood, social relations, and national identity. Artists had been locked into an official hierarchy determined by training and awards, and they enthusiastically joined the emerging free professions. The market heated up as incomes rose and advances in printing made images affordable. Visual culture responded at every level of society. A group of artists who became known as the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) (because they traveled to exhibit their work) deviated from tradition and took as subjects Russia’s peasants. Illustrated magazines achieved great influence from the 1860s on and also departed from officially promoted traditions, although in ways that differed from those of the Wanderers. Cheap lubok prints brought contemporary themes to the villages and to the urban working poor. Social change irrevocably altered perceptions of the Self and the Other – the faces people saw in their mirrors and their neighbors, relatives, and random passers-by on the street - and innovations in visual culture validated those changing perceptions. The inclusion of the visual arts in the gathering cultural energy propelled further innovation and creative genius in the years ahead.

Chapter 7 explores the ephemeral image, transcended on the journey to truth. Emphasis on inward mimesis and perception through spiritual training shifts the art-historical emphasis on material objects toward a recognition of the importance of dreams, visions, and dematerializing images in Islamic discourses. The similar functions of the trope of the image and the dream image underscore their functional interchangeability as well as the reality often ascribed to dreams and visions over materiality. This emerges in uses of the image as identification; in Prophetic visions proving his miraculous journeys; ibn Arabi’s interpretation of sleep as a metaphor for exile in the Quranic parable of the Cave of the Seven Sleepers; and in the theorization of sleep and dreams as enabling an interface with reality impossible in the waking or material world. The resulting valorization of meaning over matter suggests a mode of preservation rooted in ideas rather than physical forms, accepted as inevitably perishable. Similar tropes of the image in Nizami’s Shirin and Khosrau, and Rumi’s story of the Three Princes, suggest that the image should be approached with neither love nor hate, but with indifference.