Pollitt, Benjamin Henry; (2020) Sympathy Unbound: Dissonance and Attachment in John Webber's Atlas. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

In 1784 a print set was produced as a separate volume to accompany the publication of the official account of Captain James Cook’s third expedition, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784). The engravings in this atlas were drawn from the works of John Webber (1751–93), the expedition’s artist. The thesis seeks to connect Webber’s atlas to contemporary debates around sympathy. In the 1780s, the word sympathy was at its most semantically expansive, associated, among other things with fellow feeling, contagion, transfusion, infiltration and extraction, the great chain of being, sexual attraction, electro-magnetism, autonomic reflexes and the principle of caprice. Sympathetic attachments were both desired and precarious for Cook and his crew. When set against their embodied experiences, in terms of their exposure to new ways of understanding the world, and in the harsh physical conditions of life at sea that would have put enormous pressure on their sensory perception of the world, the instability of the concept of sympathy during this period helpfully frames in theory the epistemological and ontological doubts that would have assailed the crew, and which Webber’s images both expose and attempt to resolve. Situating these images alongside a range of visual material, both European and from around the Pacific region, the thesis centres on four main themes—the significance of sympathy in late eighteenth-century moral philosophy; sympathy and cross-cultural material exchange, notably as viewed through the figure of the feather; sympathy and the transparency of self, how the art of the encounter renders the self opaque through technologies of dazzlement; and, finally, the last chapter imagines sympathy in relation to the screen, standing at once as a means of mapping ourselves into the world, as a sort of map itself, and as the risk we run of having other worlds mapped onto us.

Download activity - last month

Export as JSONCSVXML

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONCSVXML

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Archive Staff Only

View Item