A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945

Literary critics have traditionally suggested that the invention of photography led to the rise of the realist novel, which imitated the detail and accuracy of the photographic image. Instead, says Stuart Burrows, photography’s influence on American fiction had less to do with any formal similarity between the two media than with the capacity of photography to render identity and history homogeneous and reproducible. Burrows argues for the centrality of photography to writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera - including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston.