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
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... Gothic Subject 7 Seeing Things ( " As They Are " ) : Coleridge , Schiller , and the play of Semblance 8 Vision and Revulsion : Shelley , Medusa , and the Phantasmagoria Notes Bibliography Index Preface and Acknowledgments This study ...
... Gothic ruin at the Diorama, the visual material of these chapters is largely physical. In other chapters however, the literary engagement with the visual is emphasized, and the subjects of these chapters range from Wordsworth and ...
... gothic subject matter . Marina Warner has since argued , in Phantasmagoria , that the supernatural lexicon earlier employed by magic - lantern images , which cleverly connoted " the visions of the mind's eye , " reveals " an intrinsic ...
... Gothic arch , the remains of castles , and abbeys ” —with its evocative antiquarian appeal.5 Ruins are inherently better suited to picturesque representation , by this logic , than intact examples of classical beauty : Should we wish to ...
... gothic central drama, of the encounter of the virtuous young Christabel with the spell-binding and demonic figure of Geraldine, whom she encounters while praying at midnight in the woods, is not only left unresolved, but also inflected ...
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 | |