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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... in the wake of the new visual media. This interest in the broader problems encapsulated and re-presented by the visual was also highly productive. I argue that what is commonly thought to be the Romantic Preface and Acknowledgments.
Fragments, History, Spectacle Sophie Thomas. argue that what is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible ... argues that fragmentation and ruin relate closely to the visual in articulating questions about history and ...
... argues, with “visibility, spectacle, display.” And this obsession is apparent in the extraordinary array of diversions available to the eighteenth-century spectator that he catalogues: public hangings (and other spectacles of punishment) ...
... argues that a number of prominent Victorian preoccupations—from attention to physiognomy and related detail, to modes of symbolic realism evident in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites and in literary texts such as those of Dickens and ...
... argues , precisely in the face of widespread public fascination with mimic entertainments such as this that Coleridge emphatically dismissed " simulations of nature " as " loathsome " and " disgusting " ( 3 ) ; the deceptions of a copy ...
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 | |