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 64
... Chapter 3 first appeared in European Romantic Review, 14:2 (2003), as “Assembling History: Fragments and Ruins.” My thanks go to Taylor & Francis for permission to reproduce it (http://www.informaworld.com). An earlier version of Chapter ...
... Chapter 7 , Coleridge , in staging Remorse , displays a profound interest in the epistemological and aesthetic " play of semblance " that theatrical illusion makes possible , and embraces rather willingly the sensational new ...
... Chapter 6 , for example , I argue that there is an intriguing correspondence between the technology of the diorama and its choice of gothic subject matter . Marina Warner has since argued , in Phantasmagoria , that the supernatural ...
... chapter , on Keats's fragmentary Hyperion poems , functions to articulate and develop the connection between visuality and fragmentation . I would like to use the balance of this introductory chapter , however , to elaborate two ...
... Chapter 5, as one who must “strip away the veils of familiarity” that impede clear-sightedness in a conceptual sense too. One must, by this logic, be surprised into seeing things as they are, and understand them in their proper ...
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 | |