Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Williams, Megan Rowley

Titel

Through the negative: The relationship between the photographic image and the written word in nineteenth-century American literature

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2000

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation focuses on the ways nineteenth-century writers combat and incorporate the advent of photography in their literary endeavors. By examining the interplay between writers and a culture that was struggling to comprehend the newfound importance of visual representation, this study opens a new perspective on Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Stephen Crane. I argue that it is only by analyzing the ways that nineteenth-century writes react to the photograph that we can begin to understand the diverse narrative histories of the nineteenth century that dominate our twentieth-century consciousness. The Civil War was the first “image” war, and these pictures were the first photographs that many Americans saw of death and of their national landscape. The Civil War photograph plays a pivotal role in determining how we, as Americans, perceived this conflict and continue, in the twentieth century, to approach this moment in history. As the endless collection of stills that comprises Ken Burns's The Civil War Series (1990) or the static shots that punctuate John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951) reveal, the Civil War photograph becomes the “idiom” through which this conflict was, and continues to be, understood in both written narrative and contemporary film. Chapter One proposes that The House of the Seven Gables (1850) registers a profound distrust of the daguerreotype and associates it with a rupturing of the connection between Hawthorne's present and the Puritan past. Chapter Two concentrates on two collections of photographs: George Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign (1866) and Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866). It argues that the primary ideological purpose of these images was to allow the viewer to envision a return to a Union that had been tested and strengthened by war. Chapter Three centers on Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). In contrast to Gardner's and Barnard's homage to the photographic image, Melville juxtaposes literary images of General U.S. Grant with photographs to declare that the written word is needed to inscribe a missing sense of personal and national responsibility onto the photograph's superficial image. Chapter Four interprets Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883) as a critique of the panorama as a way of seeing both American landscape and American History. Chapter Five contends that Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) revises previous images of the Civil War by having Henry Fleming experience history in the snap-shot distillations that became culturally available with the invention of the Kodak camera in 1888 and Jacob Riis's documentary use of flashlight photography in his groundbreaking How the Other Half Lives (1890).