Pre-cinematic Vision and the Modern Episteme of Sympathy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Pre-cinematic vision constitutes a significant component in Middlemarch, in relation to the larger epistemological reflection represented in the novel by characters impersonating the new epistemological concerns of philology and biology. Eliot’s realism shares with the pre-cinematic flip-book logic of thaumatropes, phenakistoscopes, zoetropes and the early forms of animated photographic vision the self-reflexive awareness of the optical and cognitive move from fragments to a dynamic unity that organises perception and the production of a modern form of knowledge. Novel-writing, therefore, appears next to biology and philology as a new medium advancing sympathy and political action as a means to entertain a dynamic unity of feeling. This form of vision enables the recognition of a figurative form of realism transcending fragmentation, which dismisses the more radical experimentations with fragmentation of the Romantic age, leaving them to the modernist full embrace of the new aesthetic.