Before Photography

The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that showcase significant scholarly work at the various intersections that currently motivate interdisciplinary inquiry in German cultural studies. Topics span German-speaking lands and cultures from the 18th to the 21st century, with a special focus on demonstrating how various disciplines and new theoretical and methodological paradigms work across disciplinary boundaries to create knowledge and add to critical understanding in German studies. The series editor is a renowned professor of German studies in the United States who penned one of the foundational texts for understanding what interdisciplinary German cultural studies can be. All works are peer-reviewed and in English. Three new titles will be published annually.

About the series editor:

Irene Kacandes is the Dartmouth Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.  She received three degrees from Harvard University and also studied at the Free University of Berlin and Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. She publishes on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics including secondary orality, rhetoric, aesthetics, trauma, witnessing, family and generational memory, experimental life writing, Holocaust testimony, and narrative theory.  She has lectured widely in the United States and Europe and currently serves as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Vice President of the German Studies Association.

Recent years have seen a wealth of new scholarship on the history of photography, cinema, digital media, and video games, yet less attention has been devoted to earlier forms of visual culture. The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic proliferation of new technologies, devices, and print processes, which provided growing audiences with access to more visual material than ever before. This volume brings together the best aspects of interdisciplinary scholarship to enhance our understanding of the production, dissemination, and consumption of visual media prior to the predominance of photographic reproduction. By setting these examples against the backdrop of demographic, educational, political, commercial, scientific, and industrial shifts in Central Europe, these essays reveal the diverse ways that innovation in visual culture affected literature, philosophy, journalism, the history of perception, exhibition culture, and the representation of nature and human life in both print and material culture in local, national, transnational, and global contexts.