Alberto Gabriele, The Emergence of Pre-Cinema: Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 229 p. US$90 (softcover) ISBN 978-1-349-95877-1.

The pre-cinema in Alberto Gabriele’s wide-ranging work encompasses the period between the late Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century, prior to the appearance and patenting of the cinematograph. It is a continuum along which the author outlines a common thread — “permanences that persist beneath apparent changes” — by bringing into focus instances of self-reflectivity in artistic creation, literary criticism, and knowledge production. The self–referentiality that emerges in the Baroque, the timeline on which the author agrees with Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, carries an epistemic and aesthetic significance.  It unsettles relations between the signs and the referents, incorporates fragmentation and a multiplicity of perspectives, opens possibilities for a continuous negotiation of meanings, and draws attention to the perceiving subject. It is a deconstructive and reconstructive force that bears on the representation of reality and the questions of order and unity. 

The Emergence of Pre-Cinema is a genealogical study that traces the dispersed history of self-reflexivity and fragmentation in the context of nineteenth century culture and print-based literary forms. The aim is to observe these phenomena in relation to their past and their future, from Baroque precursors through the twentieth-century avant-garde, beyond national borders or a predetermined periodization. The optical toys such as flipbooks or thaumatropes that the author references in the subtitle of his book draw attention to the sense of vision, subjective modes of perception, movement, and temporality. Gabriele is interested in visualizations within literary texts such as montage-like, fragmentary forms of writing by Friedrich Schlegel or cartographic imagination and panoramic descriptions of Italian landscape in painterly writing by Ann Radcliffe, for example. These multisensory and multidirectional “visions mediated by the technology of print culture” are prescient at times or contemporaneous with the technologies of early cinema. Gabriele is intent on acknowledging their long history side by side and in contrast to linear, often technologically determined narratives surrounding the invention of optical devices and the history of cinema.

Structurally, the book is composed of five parts, the first of which introduces the readers to pre-cinematic, print and visual forms of entertainment in relation to mimesis and literary production in the nineteenth century. Building on Foucault’s methodological insights on the emergence of modern episteme, Gabriele foregrounds recurring aesthetic concerns regarding perception and representation models of reality and the perspective of the observer. The section that elaborates on the positioning of the observer and the significance of self-reflectivity is especially helpful; it is generous with images and examples from art history, architecture, literary, and film studies. The remaining chapters are the case studies on, respectively: (1) the emergence of self-reflexivity in the poetry of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare and John Donne; (2) Schlegel’s experimentations with textual fragments and redefinition of reading practices within the medium of literary periodicals; (3) Radcliffe’s mappings of imagined landscapes through a complex interplay of memory, the faculty of perception, and aesthetic models that circulated in various forms of print culture; and (4) William Wordsworth’s fragmentary, sensory impressions of London from a perspective of a moving observer, which are suggestive of the mechanical eye of a camera, and  cinematic representations of reality.

These close readings of the literary texts are deeply contextualized and sustained by extensive research encompassing art history, book history, philosophy of science, literary and cinema studies. The footnotes are often informative and intriguing. For instance, this reader was compelled to add a title to her own reading list: Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture, 1420-1896. This spirited study indicates the author’s continuing interest and attention to the development of nineteenth-century culture in Europe and North America, as suggested by several references to his forthcoming publications. One reference that could have been expounded in relation to this book, however, is Giorgio Agamben’s The Signature of All Things: On Method. Gabriele acknowledges Agamben’s methodological insights in the introduction, yet he never elaborates on these, save one brief mention of signatura rerum in the second chapter. Given a sustained discussion on epistemological paradigms, the questions of unity — parts in relation to the larger whole — and knowledge production, such an omission is puzzling, especially because Gabriele develops at length what he claims to be the central questions of his genealogically-minded study.

The author certainly has a lot to say about the convergence of literary imagination and the evolving technologies of vision. This is not an easy book to read, owing in great part to a style of writing that tends at times to digressions, repetitiveness, and excessively abstract language. Nevertheless, this text demands readers’ attention for its impressive scope of vision. 

Téa Rokolj, University of Ottawa