Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914. Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe. Ed. Minsoon Kang and Amy Woodson-Boulton

• Carly McLaughlin

This volume of essays sets out to explore the relationship between visual culture and modernity, preceding from the thesis that they are intimately connected, not only because modernity produced the necessary technology to promote a popular visual culture, but also because the rise of visual culture ‘was engendered by, the essential fact of modernity, the condition of impermanence’ (p. xvii). Towards the end of the 19th century visual culture became a mode through which anxieties about modernity found expression. This condition, brought about by changes in society in the age of industrial capitalism, is understood to have triggered the crisis of representation which dominated the period’s visual culture and to underpin the search for new forms and techniques of expression. Hybridity, innovativeness, the subversion of traditional genres – modernity’s hallmarks – thus themselves become expressions of the anxiety about the modern age.

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