The portrait's subject : inventing inner life in the nineteenth-century United States / Sarah Blackwood.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blackwood, Sarah, author.

Series:

Studies in United States culture.

North Carolina scholarship online.

Studies in United States culture

North Carolina scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Portraits, American.

Identity (Psychology) in art.

Identity (Psychology) in literature.

Psychology and art.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (217 pages).

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Summary:

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the 19th century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In 'The Portrait's Subject', Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray.

Contents:

In the portrait gallery of American literature

Face: Hepzibah's scowl

Head: writing the African American portrait

Limbs: postbellum portraiture and the mind-body problem

Mind/brain: the physiognomy of consciousness

Bones: the x-ray and the inert body

Selfie nation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on December 2, 2020).

Previously issued in print: 2019.

ISBN:

979-88-908514-6-8

979-88-908514-7-5

1-4696-5260-9

1-4696-5261-7

OCLC:

1124854573