This book argues that modern forms of virtual reality first appear in the urban/commercial milieu of London in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (1780–1830). In so doing, it develops a revisionary account of relations between romanticism and popular entertainments, ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, and verbal and visual virtual realities during this period. The argument is divided into three parts. The first, ‘From the Actual to the Virtual’, focuses on developments from 1780 to 1795, as represented by Robert Barker's Panorama, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and James Graham's Temple ... More

This book argues that modern forms of virtual reality first appear in the urban/commercial milieu of London in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (1780–1830). In so doing, it develops a revisionary account of relations between romanticism and popular entertainments, ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, and verbal and visual virtual realities during this period. The argument is divided into three parts. The first, ‘From the Actual to the Virtual’, focuses on developments from 1780 to 1795, as represented by Robert Barker's Panorama, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and James Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen. The second part, ‘From Representation to Poiesis’, extends the study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century virtual realities to include textual media. It considers the relation between textual and visual virtual-realities, while also introducing the Palace of Pandemonium and Satan/Prometheus as key figures in late eighteenth-century explorations of the implications of virtual reality. The book's third part, ‘Actuvirtuality and Virtuactuality’, introduces the Romantics' diverse engagements with the virtual, which it explores through works by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Thomas Hornor, amongst others. It focuses on: attempts to describe or indirectly present the cultural, material or psychological apparatuses that project the perceptual world, and the forces that animate them; reflections on the epistemological, ethical and political paradoxes that arise in a world of actuvirtuality and virtuactuality; and experiments in the construction of virtual worlds that, like those of Shakespeare, are not bound by ‘the iron compulsion of [everyday] space and time’ (Coleridge).