Zachary Tavlin, <i>Glancing Visions: Surface and Depth in Nineteenth-Century AmericanLiterature</i>

Zachary Tavlin's innovative study o ers a fresh perspective on vision-a topic that has a long history in nineteenth-century US literary studies through the "gaze."As the introduction argues, this gaze has provided the primary focus of the study of vision in the eld, analyzed through traditions of ideological, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism that has seen it turned to people and landscapes as appropriative and violent.This book o ers an alternative to the gaze by turning to the "glance," an ostensibly more super cial form of looking that, Tavlin argues, does more with "less."Tavlin argues that the glance is an embodied mode of vision that "dissolves the boundaries between mind and world," and "achieve[s] an active receptiveness" (3-4).He associates the glance with the temporal and spatial limits of perception and highlights its inherent poetic qualities, claiming that the glance is intrinsically metrical and metonymic.In this study, the glance is contextualized through later nineteenth-and early twentieth-century discourses and media associated with vision, including phenomenology, physiological and psychological understandings of the mechanisms of vision, the rise of Impressionist (and Post-Impressionist and Modernist) visual art, and the technological developments of photography and motion pictures.These disciplines of the glance look ahead toward the twentieth century.As a result, although the book's chapters focus on the work of the nineteenth-century writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frances E.