Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in AnteBellum American Fiction

In an important rereading of American fiction in the decades preceding the Civil War, Williams (English, Ohio State University) recovers the literary and cultural significance of early photography. Williams contends that in reaction to photography's challenge to the pictorial function of narrative, authors filled their pages with descriptions of fictional portraitsfanciful and romantic, often haunted, magic, or demonic, and generally resistant to straightforward representation. She provides readings and interpretations from forgotten as well as canonical writers as examples. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.


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