Fiction in the Age of Photography

In this provocative study of British realism, Nancy Armstrong explains how Victorian fiction entered into a dynamic relationship with the new popular art of photography. So willing was the readership to think of the real as photographs, that authors from Charles Dickens to the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf had to use the same visual conventions to represent what was real, especially when they sought to debunk those conventions. The Victorian novel's collaboration with photography was indeed so successful, Armstrong contends, that literary criticism assumes a text is gesturing toward the real whenever it invokes a photograph."