E. P. Thompson: William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. ed. (1955/1977)

This biographical study is a window into 19th-century British society and the life of William Morris—the great craftsman, architect, designer, poet, and writer—who remains an influential figure to this day. This account chronicles how his concern with artistic and human values led him to cross what he called the “river of fire” and become a committed socialist—committed not only to the theory of socialism but also to the practice of it in the day-to-day struggle of working women and men in Victorian England. While both the British Labor Movement and the Marxists have venerated Morris, this legacy of his life proves that many of his ideas did not accord with the dominant reforming tendencies, providing a unique perspective on Morris scholarship.

First published by The Merlin Press, London, 1955
Publisher Pantheon Books, New York, 1977
ISBN 0394733207
829 pages

Review (Eli Zaretsky, Studies in Romanticism, 1977)
Review (Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction Studies, 1980)
Thompson’s lecture on Morris to the Williams Morris Society (1959)

Publisher (new edition, 2011)

PDF (109 MB, no OCR)
See also Morris’ novel News from Nowhere (1890/93) in the Internet Archive.

Katherine Hirt: When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (2010)

“When Machines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. This book looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art.”

Publisher De Gruyter, 2010
Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies series, 8
ISBN 3110232405, 9783110232400
170 pages
via alcibiades_socrates

Abstract of the thesis (2008)

Publisher

PDF

Jonathan Crary: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990–) [EN, HU, TR, ES, BR-PT, CN]

“In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.

Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of “subjective vision” were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.

Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as “realist,” were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.”

Publisher MIT Press, Dec 1990
October Books series
ISBN 0262031698
171 pages

Publisher (EN)

Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (English, 1990, 21 MB, updated on 2015-2-18)
A megfigyelő módszerei. Látás és modernitás a 19. században (Hungarian, trans. Ágnes Lukács, 1999, no OCR)
Gözlemcinin Teknikleri. On Dokuzuncu Yüzyılda Görme ve Modernite (Turkish, trans. Elif Daldeniz, 2002/2004, added on 2024-3-3)
Las técnicas del observador: visión y modernidad en el siglo XIX (Spanish, trans. Fernando López García, 2008)
Técnicas do observador: visão e modernidade no século XIX (BR-Portuguese, trans. Verrah Chamma, 2012, added on 2024-3-3)
Guan cha zhe de ji shu / 观察者的技术 (Chinese, 2017, added on 2024-3-3)