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About the Journal

Founded in 1974, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens is a publication affiliated with the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France, which is committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on British Victorian and Edwardian literature, art, and cultural history.

It is a double-blind, peer-reviewed bi-annual journal which accepts year-round submissions, in French or in English, for both its general and special issues, as well as book reviews.

Latest issue
102 Automne | 2025
Penser (comme) l’appareil : la naissance de la photographie ou l’étincelle disjonctive

The present issue proposes a theoretical counterpoint to the restrictive definition usually adopted when discussing photography (photography as an exclusively mimetic representation of the world), and chooses instead to consider it from an experimental angle, primarily as a device obeying specific rules, and thus as a singular medium that allows for a radically new aesthetic experience. Our focus is on the dissimilarity that photography displayed at its inception, when it emerged into the light of day under a multiplicity of forms,defying even its inventors’ ability to categorise it conceptually and ontologically. Our aim is to recall the singularity of photography, in and of itself, rather than simply contrasting it with other graphic arts. To do so, we revisit the early days of photography, when it was still only a prototype, a source of objects whose existence and significance were distinct and not simply echoes of pre-existing objects they might represent. Early photography divided rather than united, creating a new aesthetic object that resembled nothing but itself, and composing an image to be thought of ex nihilo. The history of photography is first and foremost one of dissimilarity between the world and its representation.That it is now generally conceived of in opposite terms is the result of later practice, the offspring of a learning process. At its inception, photography introduced rupture and discontinuity by mediating between man and the world, since, like all technical images, it enacted a coding operation. The articles in this volume seek to provide an overview of experimental photography in its early days, as it appeared in the United Kingdom and France (1823–1910); they highlight the epistemological upheavals that characterised photography at the time of its emergence, and discuss the theoretical issues that arose from them.

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