Paying attention to the historically specific dimensions of objects such as the photograph, the illustrated magazine and the collection, the contributors to this volume offer new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century practices of reading, viewing, and collecting, revealing new readings of Wordsworth, Shelley, James and Wilde, among others.

Illustrations, Optics and Objects offers new ways of thinking about the verbal and the visual in nineteenth-century objects and practices

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Foreword; H.Fraser Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Objects and Beholders; L.Calè & P. Di Bello PART I: BLINDING VISIONS Ekphrasis and Terror: Shelley, Medusa, and the Phantasmagoria; S.Thomas Wordsworth's Glasses: the Materiality of Blindness in the Romantic Vision; H.Tilley PART II: PHOTOGRAPHS AND THEIR PLEASURES The Wont of Photography, or the Pleasure of Mimesis; L.Smith Aesthetic Encounters: the Erotic Visions of John Addington Symonds and Wilhelm Von Gloeden; S.Evangelista PART III: ILLUSTRATIONS AND LATENT IMAGES 'Latent Preparedness': Literary Association and Visual Reminiscence in Daisy Miller ; G.Smith A Modern Illustrated Magazine: The Yellow Book Poetics of Format; L.J.Kooistra PART IV: PRECIOUS OBJECTS Dandyism, Visuality and the 'Camp Gem': Collections of Jewels in Huysmans and Wilde; V.Mills The Book Beautiful: Reading, Vision, and the Homosexual Imagination in Late Victorian Britain; M.Hatt Bibliography Index