This book analyzes the interplay of gazes, optical devices and images in literature. Following the developments of Visual Culture studies, literary theory has expanded its original field of investigation and addresses, beyond the traditional relationship between the verbal and the visual, the influence that gazes, optical devices and images can have on literary texts. This research tries to define the literary lives of the scopic regimes of modernity: the gazes of English early modern women's writing, the optical devices in German literature between Classicism and Romanticism, and the images of the mineral world in modern French aesthetics.