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and political rewriting of the novelistic format in which the distinction between the original and the copy is no longer valid, in which the defining logic of the visual dictates that the representation of a thing and the thing itself oftentimes collapse into one.

In a series of persuasive and highly dense analytical moves, Burrows places texts that have been read as antithetical to the advent of photography and instead illuminates how they can be read according to a metonymic rather than a mimetic logic. In the chapters on Hawthorne and James, in particular, canonical works – The House of the Seven Gables, The Real Thing – are read in the light of contemporary anxieties about the cancelling out of identity instead of its proliferation, about the photographic as an underlying philosophical inquiry into what constitutes identity in national as well as artistic terms.

In such terms, the introduction of ideas of racial identity in the form of Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God – and Wright's Native Son in the later chapters would seem welcome opportunities to reexamine what the photographic, in novels that ostensibly seem to not incorporate it, might do to identity formation. A Familiar Strangeness valiantly strives to reread the tropes of racial formation in a more photographically inflected light but the first chapters on the nineteenth century are nonetheless where the analysis really shines. This is possibly because Burrows abstains to a certain extent from dealing with the anthropological and sociological ramifications of photographic practice, aiming instead to formalize it as a series of maneuvers with which to track the self-reflexive and distinctly literary ways in which the novels utilize the visual. Burrows's knowledge of the history of photographic equipment is extremely useful as he very cunningly distinguishes between various photographic practices from the stereopticon to the daguerreotype in order to show how even minute differences can be traced in the fiction.

If anything, the proof of this study's brilliance, and perhaps also its shortfall, is that it could equally, and with equally impressive analytical drive, be configured as a study in the visual without photography per se as its driving force. It is telling that Emerson appears at certain key points here, as though there is an underlying argument about idealism and its place within the American psyche that is subsumed in order to make place for the camera as the overriding metaphor. Concluding that the fictional American self is always made up of a series of representations rather than one original authentic one is useful, but it is in the detailed readings of the primary texts themselves and how they resolutely refuse to shy away from their inherent ambiguities that this study really impresses.