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 73
... eighteenth century appears remarkable to us now for the rapid and diverse expansion of the visual field, not only in the development of visual devices and entertainments that duplicated or fabricated encounters with the visual world ...
... eighteenth century, to views of Rome in the Romantic period, to the popularity of scenes of Gothic ruin at the Diorama, the visual material of these chapters is largely physical. In other chapters however, the literary engagement with ...
... eighteenth century that “the culture of visuality” became visible for the first time.4 Mid-eighteenth-century Britain was obsessed, de Bolla argues, with “visibility, spectacle, display.” And this obsession is apparent in the ...
... century—as a cultural preoccupation and a source of anxiety—has its roots in preceding decades. These decades ... eighteenth century, but to the coming into being of the visual culture of modernity, with the profound and at times ...
... eighteenth century , Labbe elaborates two contrasting viewing positions that reflect a " gendered dichotomy based on a culturally constructed difference in perception - in visuality ” ( ix ) . The first is that of the prospect , the ...
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 | |