Glancing Visions

How the glance rather than the gaze in nineteenth-century literature and art anticipates the turn to modernism The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson River School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. But many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the possessive gaze, signaling a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counternarrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things. Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthornes theory of the imagination at a turning point in the history of photography, when momentary glances take on new narrative potentials. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchiesthe sentimental gaze and the slave traders glancehighlighting the life-and-death stakes of looking and looking away. Emily Dickinsons syntactical oddities and her lifelong process of stitching and unstitching the poems that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to immanence associated with animal perception. Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry Jamess vexed relationship to painterly Impressionism and William Carlos Williamss imagist poetics as a response to early cinemas use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar. Each of these literary artistsvia their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed themrefuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for the twentieth centurys twist on modernity. Glancing Visions will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and literary history, visual culture, visual theory, aesthetic philosophy, and phenomenology.