This book asks what it means to gain an overview of contemporary history. Since the industrial revolution and consequent urbanisation, the scale of the modern world has often felt too enormous to comprehend in its totality. This monograph shows that in nineteenth-century Britain, writers, artists, journalists and impresarios seeking such an overview drew on two successive but competing conceptual models: the panorama and the compilation. Both models paradoxically claimed to offer an overview on the present moment, but took very different approaches to do so. This book shows that panoramas (360° views previously associated with the Romantic period) and compilations (information-collation projects previously associated with the Victorian ) are intertwined with each other and relevant across the whole nineteenth century even as it underwent transformative change in technology and print culture. It brings together interdisciplinary research materials belonging to different periods’ silos to create new understandings of nineteenth-century relationships to knowledge. It also shows how widely both conceptual models were remediated, making them crucial lenses through which to view a broad range of genre and forms. It argues that debates about the value of overview, and the best way to achieve it, contribute to core questions in the sociology of knowledge. weiterlesen