This book analyzes different historical and cultural staging of gazes, otpical devices and images in the context of a discipline that goes by the name of visual culture. Here literary studies have contaminated and thus expanded their original field of investigation not only addressing, as in the past, the question of the relationship between verbal and visual, but also giving substance to this interweaving with an in-depth questioning about the meaning gazes, images and vision devices or, more generally, the visual media can have on literature. This research tries to define the ways in which changing cultures have addressed these questions; in particular in which ways English early modern culture, German nineteenth century fantastic, and French twentieth century natural ékphrasis have done it.