52. Immersive Realism and its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century

This session considers immersive realism and spectatorship practices as a transmedial nineteenth-century phenomenon evident across painting, theatrical spectacle, prints, and popular exhibitions such as panoramas, dioramas, peep media, stereoscopy and magic lantern projection. This immersive aesthetic sought to create the sensation of ‘being there’, collapsing the distance between the viewing subject and the image, which nevertheless remains tantalizingly beyond reach. There has been important scholarship in this field (Grau 2002; Huhtamo 2013; Barringer and Trumpener 2020); however, parallel developments in art history, theatre history, and media archaeology remain fragmented across disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, engagement within fine art and cultural heritage sectors has tended to operate independently of academic discussions. The session seeks to bring together insights from these diverse fields.

Immersive realism has often been implicated in the ‘disciplining’ of modern subjectivity, a position exemplified in the work of Jonathan Crary. According to this view, the new visual technologies trained the sensorium into industrialised spectacle and disembodiment (Crary,1999). However, recent studies emphasise its experimental nature and potential for play (Barnaby, 2017), counternarratives, and co-creation (Smyth, 2022; Newey, 2026), while drawing attention to the regional, gender, and class differences that shaped the experience of spectators (Plunkett and Kember, 2025). The session has a twofold focus. It seeks to recover the distinct range of nineteenth-century immersive arts, but also focuses on questions of affect, agency, and identity, asking how these might complicate our understanding of immersive realism, a discussion fittingly located in proximity to the Bill Douglas Cinema museum.

Themes: nineteenth-century spectacle; immersive realism; spectatorship

Additional format comment: Half or full day session of 20-minute papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions.

Lead Convenor: Patricia Smyth, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: John Plunkett, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

Hayley Bradley, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.