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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... effects and simulated experience that was often aligned with vulgar visual novelty . And yet this is only one side of the ... effect of that imaginative appropriation , by which the visible becomes the Freudian " familiar thing that has ...
... effect . The convex mirror , meanwhile , made it possible for the eye to examine " the general effect , the forms of the objects , and the beauty of the tints , in one complex view , " and to “ survey the whole under one focus . ” 32 ...
... effects all at once, or in rapid succession. The field of the visual could thus be manipulated in a manner that anticipated the effects created by the technology of the diorama. It also meant that the amateur or walker could “discover ...
... effects, conditioned how landscape could be viewed, rather than the reverse, in which nature would be taken as the ... effect (all colours and tones were “universally polluted with black”), and because it counteracted the fundamental ...
... effects of the city , he asserts that in the country , by contrast , “ all around us smile Good and Beauty — and the Images of this divine kalokagathón are miniaturized on the mind of the beholder , as a Landscape on a Convex Mirror ...
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 | |