New Agenda – David L. Pike, ‘Afterimages of the Victorian City’

Paul St George, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Alexander Stanhope St George at the launching of the steamship the Great Eastern in 1857.ttp://www.talktalk.co.uk/telectroscope/cn/gallery/files.php. 15 May 2010. Digitally manipulated version of Robert Howlett, I. K. Brunel with chains. Courtesy of Paul St George.

The Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. In JVC 15.2, David L. Pike explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. He sees spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street  and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972) to the material culture of steampunk and the Telectroscope by the artist Paul St George (2009).

To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=254.

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