Literature and Photographs of Roger Fenton in the Context of Victorianism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/kis.2021.53.173.17Keywords:
Victorian literature, Alice in Wonderland, poem about a wounded deer, Roger Fenton’s photographs, photo-literature, deer-man transformation, wounded soldier, dead soldierAbstract
In this paper, we bring together Victorian literature, primarily Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and the poem about a wounded deer by Emily Dickinson, and Roger Fenton’s photographs from the Crimean War and his photographs of deer. Thereby, a parallel is drawn between the powerful symbolism of the deer and its transformation in Victorian literature on the one hand, and the depiction of a wounded soldier in Fenton’s photographs. By comparing scenes from war photographs, deer photographs, and the photograph of a wounded soldier, with scenes described in Victorian literature, we try to penetrate deeper into the photograph itself, using the richness of the literary language. We also discover that which photography and its visual language make very clear to us, which literature has either missed or needs too many words to achieve a similar effect. Considering that the relationship between literature and photography, in the context of the so-called photo-literature, is extremely complex, we try to shed some light on it using a modest sample of segments drawn from a few works of literature, and photographs by Roger Fenton.
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