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. |
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... actual image and the one imagined by the reader : a surfeit of detail obscures rather than clarifies the image . Diderot moves from these difficulties to a meditation on the difference between seeing and imagining , suggesting that the ...
... actual seeing . " This verbal image , moreover , was said to be more powerful than the visual image in its capacity to stimulate the imagination ; nevertheless , the imagination's representations were explicitly shaped by visualist ...
... actual act of seeing is readily metamorphosed, and metaphorised, into an act of imaginative and ideological significance: and thus it is that the natural world figures prominently in discussions of aesthetics throughout the eighteenth ...
... actual nature of seeing than it had ever been before” (41); the picturesque, by contrast, had aimed to bring the observation of the visual world into line with the possibilities of painting. The one, on this evidence, is the inverse of ...
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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 | |