Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America by Wendy Bellion

Abstract

Wendy Bellion's project in her finely crafted book, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America, is to show how pictorial and optical illusions, when considered alongside Enlightenment theories of sensory perception and discernment, shaped notions of American citizenship, representation, and subjectivity.