This innovative collection of essays offers exciting new research and thoughtful reflection on the subject of visual culture and its relationship to art history.

• Brings together innovative scholarship by major scholars.
  
• Engages with cross-cultural questions, asking if attention to visual culture is a western preoccupation.
  
• Draws on a wide range of cultures, locations and historical periods, from the eighth century China to contemporary South Africa, from Byzantium to early modern and modern Europe.
  
• Covers a wealth of visual forms and media including photography, film, painting, sculpture, drawing, installation and the decorative arts

Deborah Cherry is Editor of Art History and Professor of the History of Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Her publications include The Edwardian Era (1987), Treatise on the Sublime (1990), Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993), Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture (2000), and Speak English (2002). She is currently completing Living with the Dead: Reinventing the Victorians in the Twentieth Century and working on a study of contemporary installation art.