Visualizing Egypt: European travel, book publishing, and the commercialization of the Middle East in the nineteenth century

Uittreksel

"Bonaparte's short-lived 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel, and improvements in printing technology in nineteenth-century France and Britain, a new publishing business dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts picturing Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture emerged to cater to a growing European fascination. Visualizing Egypt is about these nineteenth-century French and British illustrated publications filled with images brought from travel to Egypt and then published and promulgated to the Western audience. It analyzes the context and process of production of these books, from their conceptualization to the finished product and its afterlife, from marketing to the sales of these books, and from circulation to their reception by the nineteenth-century audience. By following the long, arduous, and often risky publishing journeys of the makers of these books, from publishers to writers, and artists, such as the Frenchman Émile Prisse d'Avennes, Paulina Banas reveals changing market demands, collaborations, conflicting views, and the unsettled authorship of these works prompting us to think more profoundly about the artistic and intellectual exchange in the world of 19th-century Orientalist book production. By bringing together interests in travel writing, illustration, commerce, the free enterprise of publishing, and technology more broadly, Visualizing Egypt regards nineteenth-century book illustrations on Egypt and the "Orient" not merely as expressions of enduring ideology and colonial propaganda, but as representations shaped by the often-overlooked commercial exigencies of the growing publishing industry and the reckless competition among them."-- Provided by publisher.

Inhoud

Making it "Modern" : The Publisher's Perspective and the Marketing of the Nile Valley -- Observing, Recording, and Building the Archive : The Author's Perspective -- Creating Cultural Tropes : The Publishers, the Authors, and the Politics of Circulation of Visual Sources -- Recasting Stereotypes? Multivocal Reading through the Artist, Writer, and Audience's Perspective -- Conflicting Viewpoints and New Visualization Strategies : The Audience, Publisher(s), Author(s), and the Printmakers -- The Authors, the Uneven Politics of Citation and Collaboration, and the Reuse of Commercial Photographs -- Epilogue: The Venture of Orientalist Publishing.