Are we there yet? : virtual travel and Victorian realism / Alison Byerly.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Byerly, Alison.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Realism in literature.

Travel in literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2012.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination with "virtual travel" with the rise of realism in nineteenth-century fiction and twenty-first-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the nineteenth century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place-360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides-offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of "virtual travel" reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and twenty-first-century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part 1 Going Nowhere! Panoramic Travel 29

1 A Room with a View: The Victorian Panorama 35

2 The Passing Scene: Moving Panoramas 41

3 Wish You Were Here: Marketing the Experience 47

4 Watching the Grand Tour 55

5 Moving Pictures: The View from a Balloon 59

6 Surveying the Scene: The Panoramic Gaze 66

7 The Hypothetical Tourist 70

Part 2 Total Immersion: Navigating the Thames 83

1 No Place Like Home: The Thames as England 87

2 Journey to the Interior 97

3 You Are Here: The Guided Tour 104

4 Blogging the Trip: Three Men in a Boat 111

5 Back to the Future: News from Nowhere 117

6 River of Oblivion: The London Thames 122

7 Change of Pace: The Rush toward Leisure 134

Part 3 High-Speed Connection: The Railway Network 143

1 Frankenstein's Monster: The Cyborg Engine 152

2 Neither Here nor There: The Body in Transit 154

3 User's Manuals: The Railway Guide 167

4 Chat Rooms: The Social Space of Trains 173

5 Game Over: The Railway Journey as Dream and Nightmare 181

6 The Matrix: Railway Junctions as Non-Spaces 187

7 World Wide Web: Information Networks in Sherlock Holmes and Dracula 190

8 Moving through Media 200.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472071869

9780472051861

9780472028764

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.2333731

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.