Vision, science and literature, 1870-1920 : ocular horizons

This book explores the role of vision and the culture of observation in Victorian and modernist ways of seeing.

Willis charts the characterization of vision through four organizing principles-small, large, past and future-to survey Victorian conceptions of what vision was.

He then explores how this Victorian vision influenced twentieth-century ways of seeing, when anxieties over visual "truth" became entwined with modernist rejections of objectivity.