Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, SpectacleRoutledge, 2007 M12 12 - 246 pages This book investigates the productive crosscurrents between visual culture and literary texts in the Romantic period, focusing on the construction and manipulation of the visual, the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination, and on fragments and ruins as occupying the shifting border between the visible and the invisible. It examines a broad selection of instances that reflect debates over how seeing should itself be viewed: instances, from Daguerre's Diorama, to the staging of Coleridge's play Remorse, to the figure of the Medusa in Shelley's poetry and at the Phantasmagoria, in which the very act of seeing is represented or dramatized. In reconsidering literary engagements with the expanding visual field, this study argues that the popular culture of Regency Britain reflected not just emergent and highly capitalized forms of mass entertainment, but also a lively interest in the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of looking. What is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible gives way to a generative fascination with the visual and its imaginative--even spectacular--possibilities. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 62
... English literature — 19th century — History and criticism . 2. Art and literature - Great Britain - History - 19th century . 3. Visual perception in literature . 4. Imagination in literature . 5. Aesthetics in literature . 6 ...
... English became a nation of “starers” I suggest that this was because the creation and control of the visual field was part of the novelty, part of what was being made and presented as spectacular. Daguerre's Diorama, for example, with ...
... English idea of landscape, derives from the imitation of seventeenth-century Italian and Dutch painting. Indeed, there is an amusing moment in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia when a character asserts that “English landscape was invented by ...
... English Dictionary points to its familiar habitations : “ an extant portion of a written work which as a whole is lost ; a portion of work left uncompleted by its author ; a part of anything uncompleted . " 2 The fragment inhabits a ...
... English landscape, which extended from the superficial remnants of early settlements, to their domestic, religious, and cultural remains thrown up or dug up from long burial underground. This interest had a literary component too, for ...
Contents
The Fragment in Ruins | |
Ruins History Museums | |
Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight | |
The Diorama the Double and the Gothic Subject | |
Coleridge Schiller and the play of Semblance | |
Shelley Medusa and the Phantasmagoria | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |