Read The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies)

The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies)

Peter Brownlee

4.9/5 (18143 ratings)

Description: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.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies). To get started finding The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies), you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: —

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: —

Release: —

ISBN: 0812295307

Description: 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.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies). To get started finding The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies), you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Special Offer | $0.00

Special Offer! | $0.00

The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies)

The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America (Early American Studies)

More Books

Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe

Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe

Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic

Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic

American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life

American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life

New Zealand Schoolteachers: Blair Peach, Folole Muliaga, Gerry Brownlee, Peter O'Leary, Angus Hikairo MacFarlane, Mahara Okeroa, Whina Cooper

New Zealand Schoolteachers: Blair Peach, Folole Muliaga, Gerry Brownlee, Peter O'Leary, Angus Hikairo MacFarlane, Mahara Okeroa, Whina Cooper

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North by Brownlee Peter John Burns Sarah Dillon Diane Greene Daniel Stevens Scott Manning (2013-09-30) Hardcover

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North by Brownlee Peter John Burns Sarah Dillon Diane Greene Daniel Stevens Scott Manning (2013-09-30) Hardcover

Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic by Peter John Brownlee (2015-10-02)

Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic by Peter John Brownlee (2015-10-02)

Rare Peter John Brownlee / Samuel F.B Morse's Gallery of the Louvre and the Art 2014 - New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014 [Hardcover] Brownlee, Peter John

Rare Peter John Brownlee / Samuel F.B Morse's Gallery of the Louvre and the Art 2014 - New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014 [Hardcover] Brownlee, Peter John

American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life by Peter John Brownlee (2013-02-28)

American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life by Peter John Brownlee (2013-02-28)

The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World

The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World