Introduction: Ut Pre-cinema Poesis—Fragmentation, Animated Movement and the Modern Episteme

The introduction places the discussion of pre-cinematic spectacles, which has attracted the attention of several scholars in the fields of art history and film studies, as well as a growing number of literary scholars, in the context of the history of the modern novel. Taken together, the references to pre-cinematic spectacles in the nineteenth-century novels discussed constitute a so-far-unacknowledged theory of the modern novel and its epistemological scope. The references to pre-cinematic ‘philosophical toys’ appear as isomorphic with the new intellectual landscape envisioned by the disciplines of the modern episteme that the novelists discussed in this book engage with. The self-reflexive experimental nature of these visualisations has also a ground-breaking and liberating effect in the history of aesthetics and text-image synergies: it allows to push representation beyond the aesthetic impasse of the ut pictura poesis model, into often unacknowledged ‘grey areas’ of aesthetic representation that anticipate some of the developments of twentieth century modernist art and avant-garde cinema.