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This chapter takes Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as a representative example of the ‘waking dreams’ constructed by gothic fictions. In so doing, it reconceptualizes some of the key features of gothic fiction: its unprecedented mixing of conventions designed to represent the actual world with those normally deployed to evoke the marvellous; its ability to evoke in readers a powerful sense of the reality of its unreal worlds; and the consequent power of these virtual-realities to rouse the emotions of those who enter them. The argument begins with an account of John Locke's use of the camera obscura and magic lantern to illustrate the distinction between sensation and imagination, reason and passion, the real and the virtual; and it draws on the sensational psychology of David Hume, in which the mind itself is ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance’.

This chapter examines the way the early photograph was historicized, analyzed and discussed by its early practitioners in reviews on photography in journals and newspapers that appeared in the 1840s. It argues that for early practitioners the photographic image was conceived to be very different from the image of the camera obscura. While in the camera obscura the image forms itself instantaneously and uniformly, the photograph develops through time. Thus the camera obscura image was always the same because it excluded time from its process of formation, whereas the photograph introduced time as a differentiating element into its form of production, resulting in a variety of contingent unaccountable effects. The chapter analyses Talbot’s botanical images, John Herschel’s vegetable photographs and Robert Hunt’s early histories of photography.

The chapter analyzes how the nineteenth century’s two most significant immersive media—panoramas and stereoscopic photographs—comment on and draw attention to their differences as media through their respective uses of Walter Scott’s novels and poems, and, in turn, how these medial differences bring into relief the aesthetic and philosophical novelty of Scott’s own efforts to write visually. To make its argument, the chapter draws on a wide variety of archives and forms of evidence, including: period guidebooks to panoramas; the histories of media technologies like camera obscuras, linear perspective, and stereoscopes; Victorian stereographs of Scotland, especially by George Washington Wilson; readings of visually evocative passages in Scott’s Waverley, Ivanhoe, and The Fair Maid of Perth; Eugène Delacroix’s painting Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe; and Romantic writings on optics and vision, including Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft and his friend David Brewster’s scientific treatises on monocular and binocular vision.

This chapter provides a new intellectual context for John Milton’s treatment of light and vision in Paradise Lost (1667) by locating Milton’s poem within the framework of seventeenth-century optical theory. It does so by examining the parallels and distinctions between the role played by light in Milton’s model of vision and models proposed by Johannes Kepler and René Descartes. The main argument of the chapter is that Milton adopts Kepler’s theory of the retinal image, which posits that the human eye operates according to the mechanical principles of a camera obscura. But where Kepler and Descartes use the analogy of the camera obscura to explain the properties of light as it relates to vision, Milton uses it to express the fragility of vision within this new model. Speaking from a position of blindness, Milton’s narrator explores the theological and epistemological implications of having light at ‘one entrance quite shut out’, thereby being ‘presented with a Universal blanc’ (PL 3.48–50) in the place of the retinal projection screen.

This conclusion links Kepler’s conception of harmony to his understanding of perspective and perception. It begins with his engagement with optics and perspective via the camera obscura, and turns next to his vision of the relationship between the Copernican theory of the cosmos and human perception. He used his Somnium, in particular, to argue for the importance of perspective-shifting in the search for truth. The conclusion then turns to Kepler’s vision of architectural harmony and historical perspective via a discussion of the frontispiece to his Rudolphine Tables. Finally, it considers Kepler in the context of larger discussions of cosmopolitanism, and in particular of the difference between cosmopolitan universalism and cosmopolitan pluralism.

Between 1604 and 1611 Johannes Kepler published two fundamental works laying the foundation for modern physiological optics. However, Galileo continued in his adherence to old theories of vision based mainly on purely geometrical assumptions with little concern for the optical events occurring when light rays passed through the cornea, crystalline, and other intraocular media. This notwithstanding, with his cord experiment Galileo succeeded in giving a fairly good (for the age) estimate of the angular size of stars, while Kepler still adhered to the disproportionately large values of Tycho Brahe and his predecessors. Although based on outdated conception of the visual process, Galileo’s approach to the visual appearance of stars was pragmatically successful, despite being free from a theoretical framework. Practical opticians of his age also adopted this strategy.

In luminist and cinematic registers, the chapter first explicates Deleuze’s complementary chronologics of Aion and Chronos. While durational Aion is the time of luminist glow, flickering Chronos is the time of strobe light: wave and particle. Shifting from time to space, the chapter then addresses Deleuze’s topologics. After introducing the notion of fractal space in terms of Deleuze’s notion of becoming-imperceptible, it delineates, via Leibniz’ images of the baroque house and the camera obscura, Deleuze’s transformation of the spatial dualism of light surface and dark depth into the luminous space of a fractal chiaroscuro, and it shows how Deleuze’s luminous philosophy resonates with Leibniz’ proposition that monads, as points or centres of light, have a luminous nature. After explicating the mathematical concept of the ‘real projective plane,’ the chapter argues that Deleuze’s shift from a Cartesian to a projective topology of thought is fundamental for an understanding of his philosophy.

The primary focus of this chapter is on how the perspectivist visual paradigm, or certain elements of it, were disseminated not only through university teaching but also through preaching, literature, and painting. The result was the emergence of optical literacy, which in turn spawned a critical interest in optics among thinkers, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who were not formally educated but intellectually and empirically perceptive. Among other things, such critical interest led to increasing recognition of the shortcomings of the perspectivist paradigm in explaining such optical anomalies as artistic illusionism, which cannot be adequately accounted for by ray-geometry.

Chapter 25 explains the construction and use of the astrolabe with reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe. The astrolabe is a rotating map of the heavens constructed using a stereographic projection of the celestial sphere. The projection techniques required to create this map is reminiscent of the projections used by artists to show perspective, and it is closely related to the techniques of cartographers. The most familiar world maps are produced using the Mercator projection devised by Gerardus Mercator in the sixteenth century. Johannes Vermeer included maps in many of his paintings, most notably The Geographer and The Astronomer, and the figure in these painting might be the great microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. The architect Philip Steadman made an in-depth study of whether Vermeer employed a camera obscura when painting.

In what sense, and to what extent, can we say that Descartes is a photographic thinker? Engaging Wolf-Devine on the materialism of Cartesian vision among others as a point of departure, the reading traces the twofold origin of paradoxical blindness or the photographic instant in Cartesian “ocularcentrism,” taking it as a haunting marker of modern reflexivity that is blind to itself. The focus thereby is on the paradigm shift from materialism (Optics) to idealism (Meditations), the transfer of epistemic register from photo-grammatical inscription to pictorial representation, which anticipates the issue of transcendental blindness and memory (Lacan and Derrida); noted, in turn, is the shift of focus back from idealism to materialism (Passions of the Soul), along with which the question of empirical blindness is raised in terms of the necessary link between literal blindness and tactile affectivity as a cognitive condition (Bergson and Merleau-Ponty), all already in Descartes. By thematizing this way the residual and repeated aporia of the ego’s photographic access to the cogito, we can sense the crypto-grammatical strands of the other, aesthetical Descartes and alternative Modernity, which also points to the Benjaminian inauguration, in Descartes, of the non-anthropocentric notion of seeing as reading and interpreting as decoding.

The concept of parallax is fundamental to this study; it is an idea derived from the rhetoric of visual art which explains a perspective, wherein an object appears to be different when perceived from different point of views. The book focuses on the parallax viewing of modern Japanese literature, using both the mainstream Japanese literature and buraku literary arts as contrasting outlooks. The forms of mainstream and buraku exist alongside each other, and together they constitute a conceptual middle ground through which one can view a material world. This visual metaphor is then applied in the discourse concerning Kenji Nakagami’s use of language and his relationship with mixed-media forms; the use of parallax is also a way of revising an important symbol for modernity: the camera obscura.

In 1688 the Irishman William Molyneux posed his famous question to John Locke: if a man born without sight, and who already knew a solid cube and sphere through direct tactile experience, was now able to see, would he be able to tell which was which by sight alone, without touching them? The reason Ernst Cassirer called it “the central question of eighteenth century epistemology and psychology” in 1951 is the crux of this chapter.