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Striving to extradite itself from a tendency to demarcate the intersections between photography and fiction in strictly modernist terms, Burrows's reading of a select group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers is a welcome addition, at times even an extraordinary effort, in rereading photography as a crucial concern for a series of writers commonly seen in terms of not visual, but rather literary, aesthetics.
Burrows's readings of Hawthorne, James, Faulkner and Hurston, amongst others, hinge on the idea that a photographic text can be one that responds to the conceptual framework of doubling and repetition, in ways that counter traditional readings of photographic literature as, above all, about the mimetic. Instead of focussing on the concepts of the original and the copy within photographic discourse, Burrows sees the invention of the camera as the beginning of an aesthetic and political rewriting of the novelistic format...