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Those unfamiliar with earlier publications by Jérôme Baschet, a member of the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, might well approach this modest little paperback in expectation of a useful but uninspiring handbook devoted to the matching of written text and visual image. Defined by Erwin Panofsky as preliminary to the true interpretation of meaning, iconography has too often been conceived in practice as a matter of identification and description; more recently, it has slipped out of favor with the advent of interpretive models that liberate the image from passive dependence… Full Review

“Both at the moment of the Revolution and long after its official end,” writes Trish Loughran in The Republic in Print, “the challenge posed by national dispersion would be the most recurrent problem in American political economy” (62). The “United States” had to be constructed as a self-evident, self-identical entity during precisely the period that its populations were dispersing most rapidly over a vast geographical space. How did anything like unity—rhetorical or actual—emerge from conditions characterized primarily by difference, distance, delay, and displacement? Standard accounts of print culture in the early national period stress the role of print as… Full Review

In his historiographic essay “American Histories of Photography,” Anthony Lee claims that the photographic field is “mercurial and eclectic” in both “interests and methods.” This happens, he asserts, “partly because its subject has continually proved to be a moving target . . . and partly because the contours of photography’s multiple histories have touched on so many areas of inquiry—aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and more. For these and other reasons, the American history of photography is and always was a hybrid affair, pillaging its questions and attitudes from many sources in an effort to get hold of its subject” (Anthony W… Full Review

For decades, the art of the northern Netherlands has received far less attention than that of its southern counterpart. Even the study of early Netherlandish painting has focused almost exclusively on visual imagery produced in Flanders or by Flemish artists. A new trend, however, seems to be emerging. In 2008, the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam held a major exhibition, Vroege Hollanders, focusing on late fifteenth-century Dutch painting. The last exhibition devoted to this imagery, Middeleeuwse kunst der Noordelijke Nederlanden, had occurred in 1958. John Decker’s The Technology of Salvation and the Art of Geertgen tot… Full Review

The postcard reproduction of John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888) is a perennial bestseller at the Tate Britain gift shop. This popularity mirrors Victorian public response to the artist’s work, which was greeted with acclaim at the Royal Academy throughout the late nineteenth century. In the intervening years, however, Waterhouse's popular appeal has become divorced from artistic and scholarly opinion, and there has been little academic attention paid to his painting or his continued popularity. It is now his turn to be rescued from this critical oblivion by the rising tide of scholarly reappraisal of Victorian and Academic… Full Review

The twenty-first-century visitor to the gardens of Versailles has at least one thing in common with Louis XIV, the Bourbon king of France responsible for their creation in the third and fourth quarters of the seventeenth century: Upon leaving the chateau and proceeding into the gardens, one is unclear which route along the alleés and through the bosquets is optimal for experiencing the essence of the park. As Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin establish in Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV, the king himself was of many minds regarding how best to visit… Full Review

Images in Spite of All is devoted to four images, specifically, the only four of the one-and-a-half million surviving photographs of the Nazi camps to depict the actual process of mass killing. Shot within and immediately outside the gas chambers at Auschwitz’s crematorium V, the images show naked women prisoners herded into the gas chambers and the mass cremation of corpses. Smuggled out of Auschwitz by the Polish resistance, the photographs were taken under the most extreme conditions of prohibition by members of the Sonderkommando, the special squad of prisoners compelled in the face of their own impending death to… Full Review

Early on in John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, protagonist and Victorian scientist Charles Smithson spends a solitary morning hunting fossils along the coast of southwest England. An avowed follower of Charles Darwin, Smithson extracts an exquisite fossil-specimen from the flinty rock, aiming to gift it to his fiancée. Yet, as Fowles’s narrator wryly suggests, what our scientist is unable to perceive in this small, attractive object is the menace it portends to the conditions of his own existence. In this beautiful relic of extinguished life, Smithson is incapable of discerning any connection to the revolutionary implosions that… Full Review

G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary is not a catalogue raisonné of the work of Watts, the artist whose work was simultaneously both deeply eccentric from and superbly characteristic of Victorian painting and sculpture. Omitting major works in the collection of the Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery among others, it is far from a complete survey. Yet because the volume documents (with lush color illustrations) the extensive collection of key works, preparatory and preliminary investigations, as well as personal artefacts that the artist and his wife collected for their own gallery of his work, it comes closer to being… Full Review

There is something of a difficulty in reviewing two such dissimilar publications—an edited collection and a monograph—yet they have a number of themes in common: both attend to the normative requirements of engaging with gender, race, and class (if not so much with sexuality); but they also intersect more particularly with issues that appear key for contemporary archival studies in the humanities. These issues might be opened with reference to the introduction to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), where Fredric Jameson noted that… Full Review