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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... become more pressing, and more difficult to resolve 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 ...
... becomes a more conscious and culturally inflected act, with a range of new practices and forms of representation: looking itself becomes visible. At the other end of the Romantic period, in Victorian Britain, a powerful fascination with ...
... becomes possible to “see” the impact made by the paradigms and procedures of visual modes on the writing of the period. However, this study further contends that those visual modes were conceived in terms that emphasized, in a thematic ...
... becomes the Freudian " familiar thing that has undergone repression , " mandates its return , a return that can only destabilize the mind's apparent mastery of the real . The visible is not merely absent from ( or , an absence in ) the ...
... becomes central to the articulation of this emergent visual, and social, paradigm, and a gage of its impact on the ... become, as noted above, highly mediated and self-conscious, is particularly evident in how it became itself the focus ...
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 | |