Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing the Big Picture (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

This book shows how in nineteenth-century Britain, confronted with the newly industrialized and urbanized modern world, writers, artists, journalists and impresarios tried to gain an overview of contemporary history. They drew on two successive but competing conceptual models of overview: the panorama and the compilation. Both models claimed to offer a holistic picture of the present moment, but took very different approaches. This book shows that panoramas (360° views previously associated with the Romantic period) and compilations (big data projects previously associated with the Victorian fin de siècle ) are intertwined, relevant across the entire century, and often remediated, making them crucial lenses through which to view a broad range of genre and forms. It brings together interdisciplinary research materials belonging to different period silos to create new understandings of how nineteenth-century audiences dealt with information overload. It argues for a new politics of distance: one that recognizes the value of immersing oneself in a situation, event or phenomenon, but which also does not chastise us for trying to see the big picture. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, visual culture and information studies. Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Overviews of the Present Big Data and Distance Memory and the Contemporary Methodology and Outline of the Book Part I: Panoramic Perspective Chapter 2: Contemporary History in Panoramas Panoramas of Contemporary History Narrative Through Paratexts Panoramic Overview Through Immersion Conclusions Chapter 3: Panoramic Perspective in Histories of the French Revolution: Thomas Carlyle Versus Archibald Alison Temporal Overview Social History Conclusions CHAPTER 4: The Napoleonic Wars from Near and Far: Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts Proximity and Distance We Are All Contemporary Historians Napoleon Conclusions Part II: Transition: Between Panoramas and Compilations CHAPTER 5: Photography Remediated in the Crimean War: Illustration, Exhibition and Collection Photography and Panoramas in the Crimean War Compilations of Photography Conclusions Part III: Big Data: Compilations of Contemporaneity chapter 6: An Index to the Scale of Modernity: Big Data Compilations and the Review of Reviews A Brief History of Nineteenth-Century Compilation Big Data and Compilations The Review of Reviews: A Compilation of Contemporary History Innovative Compilation Practices in Review of Reviews Conclusions chapter 7: Ephemeral Collective Biography in Men of the Time (1852–99) What Was Men of the Time? Whom to Select? How to Be Superseded Reception and Usage Conclusions chapter 8: Collective Biography as Monument? The Dictionary of National Biography Why So Many Nineteenth-Century Lives? Challenge 1: Whom to Include? Challenge 2: Size and Scope Challenge 3: Office Politics Challenge 4: Auto/Biography and Personal Knowledge Remediated Conclusions chapter 9: Conclusions: Overview Through Immersion From Panoramas to Compilations Remediation and Intermediality Trust, Big Data and the Big Picture Bibliography Index