The Stereoscopic Picturesque : Nineteenth-Century Photography, Literary Landscapes, and the Third Dimension

The Stereoscopic Picturesque is an interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century 3D photography and its relation to the picturesque tradition in art, literature, and tourism.The study focuses on the invention of the stereoscope, originally a laboratory device for demonstrating the nature of three-dimensional vision, and the simultaneous invention of photography, in order to show how early stereo photographers used the optics of the stereoscope to extend the possibilities of picturesque representation.Their images also made “virtual travel” possible for an international mass audience, allowing millions of people to explore places and natural wonders that they would otherwise never have seen.Many of these places had deep literary associations - Wordsworth’s Lake District, for instance, or Scott’s Trossachs - and the stereography of these regions constitutes an important, yet largely unexplored, chapter in the reception history of these authors.Many of the photographs were deliberate atte