Nineteenth-century moon imaginaries in popular visual culture and planetary critique

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this article, I use the term “nineteenth century” as a tool of hermeneutic orientation vis-à-vis the twentieth century. My examples come from the period between the 1830s and 1902, thus working with a notion of the long nineteenth century rather than ending strictly in 1900. Moreover, although I refer to “nineteenth-century imaginaries,” I am aware that this was not a homogenized period of history, and the imaginaries in question also differed in their media materializations and messages. However, although nineteenth-century moon imaginaries are fairly heterogenous, all my examples share the common denominator that they engage with planetary critique, as my argument will show.

2 Indeed, such imaginaries appeared not only visual culture, but also in works of literature such as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1900–1901), and in musical works such as Jacques Offenbach’s opéra féerie A Trip to the Moon (1875), to name only a very few examples.

3 The following discussion of scholarly and popular moon imaginaries draws on Mia Fineman and Beth Saunders's (2019) catalogue Apollo’s Muse, published to accompany the excellent exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

4 Locke later published the book The Great Moon Hoax in 1859.

5 This suggests an (incorrect) belief that the moon was volcanic in origin, a view later propagated by James Nasmyth in his book The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (1874).

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Kathrin Maurer

Kathrin Maurer is Professor of Humanities and Technology at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on surveillance technology, drones, discourses of war, and visual culture. She is the leader of the “Drone Imaginaries and Communities” research cluster funded by the Independent Research Foundation Denmark. She is also the current leader of the University of Southern Denmark's Center for Culture and Technology and the PI for the research project “The Aesthetics of Biomachines and the Question of Life” (granted by The Velux Foundations). She has published widely on civilian and military drones and their intersections with visual arts, literature, and film. She is the author of the monograph The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities (MIT Press, 2023), and she co-edited the collected volumes Drone Imaginaries: The Power of Remote Vision (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Visualizing War: Emotions, Technologies, Communities (Routledge, 2018).