Vance Byrd. A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017, 218 pp., 18 illustrations, 8 color plates.

Summary

Vance Byrd's monograph demonstrates how the panorama helped create a modern sense of identity for the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Germany. The panorama was a popular visual medium, yet most Germans experienced it not firsthand, but in printed texts. Germans could read descriptions of panoramas, purchase guides and keys to well-known panoramas, and find panorama-like perspectives and metaphors in the literature of their time. Consequently, Byrd treats the panorama as both medium and metaphor, as both physical object and as practices that advanced a “literary pedagogy of observation.” Panoramas and their literary manifestations created an immersive world in which to debate the potentialities of modern life.

The first chapter of this book analyzes the invention of the panorama and highlights the ephemera and material objects that accompanied it: advertisements, guidebooks, keys, etc. These tools made a panorama readable, but also made it less immediate; they interrupted the sense of visual engagement and immersion with the panorama itself. Hence, the panoramic experience was not an unfettered gaze comprehending a unified compositional field, but entailed the reconciliation of that visual field with accumulated information, details, and facts gained through reading. Such readings helped audiences transform visual experience into experiences of the imagination. “The cognitive and intellectual process of producing and seeing a panorama, the attempt at unifying nature, history, and politics under the same gaze, illustrates the totalizing ambition of this mode of representation” (32), an ambition that endured in literature of the nineteenth century.

The second chapter details the treatment of the panorama in fashion journals, most prominently in F. J. Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786– 1827), and traces how the journal brought the panorama from the heterotopia of the popular fair to the bourgeois household. The journals made the panorama German (asserting its German rather than British provenance), bourgeois (linking panoramas to the bourgeois landscape garden), and domestic (panoramic images became fashionable entertainments within bourgeois households). Panoramas thus allowed Germans to envision themselves as bourgeois subjects of a potentially modern nation.